The Crying Book

By Heather Christle

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears—exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." —Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias

"Spellbinding and propulsive—the map of a luminous mind in conversation with books, songs, friends, scientific theories, literary histories, her own jagged joy, and despair. Heather Christle is a visionary writer." —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review).

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948226455

Heather Christle

Heather Christle is the author of the four full-length poetry collections, including Heliopause, published by Wesleyan in March 2015. Her previous books are What is Amazing, The Difficult Farm, and The Trees The Trees, which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and other publications. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. She is the web editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Christle received her BA in English from Tufts University and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Reviews for The Crying Book

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A long, complexly braided essay (but a short book) about tears, crying, grief, despair, depression. Which sounds grim but is actually really interesting—it's a subject much on my mind lately, anyway. It's strong on poetry with a little science and history, in good proportions, and the footnotes alone are worth the price of admission because they reference so much good material. A thoughtful book, and far less sad than it sounds.