The Crying Book
Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying ― from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence.
Told in short, poetic snippets, The Crying Book delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women’s agency ― or lack of agency ― in everyday life. Christle’s gift is the freshness of her voice and honesty of her approach, both of which create an intimacy with readers as she explores a human behavior broadly experienced but rarely questioned. A beautiful tribute to the power of crying, and to working through despair to tears of joy.
Author: Heather Christle | Publisher: Catapult
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Rating: 5 / 5
First, big thanks to the folks over at Catapult for sending me a finished copy of The Crying Book. Accurately described as “a dazzling meditation on tears” and “a symphonic work of nonfiction,” it is a masterpiece.
“When I am not in despair I can barely even describe it. It is a trap door in my life. A bridge to nowhere. It is only a metaphor, a line. But one I send my love across.”
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to see the world through a poet’s eyes? Heather Christle — who has published four poetry collections — gives us a glimpse. The Crying Book is part memoir, part physical exploration, part societal observation, and 100% emotion.
The book began, she says, as the idea to list all the places she had cried. Then she started researching tears more, and she lost a friend to suicide, and her daughter was born, and then years passed and the result is this genius book. It’s written in short snippets of prose, all of them stitched together with care. The feelings and ideas and themes move forward and backward, circle around on themselves, come back to punch you in the gut when you’re least expecting them.
It’s the kind of book where you just can’t help but pick up a pencil and start circling passages. I can already tell that I’m going to shove it into the hands of many friends and family members.
“Friends keep sending me links to Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photography project ‘The Topography of Tears.’ It’s a series of photographs of dried tears taken through a microscope, the salt crystals forming little emotional terrains. The tears of grief blaze stark and mostly perpendicular, breaking here and there into clusters of curves. Onion tears are a dense and fernlike wallpaper. You could imagine it hanging in the house of a depthless decorator.”
This book reaches into your gut and names the parts of yourself that you have been searching for. Doesn’t that sound like the best way to spend 171 pages?