I finally sat down and read The Crying Book by Heather Christle. I absolutely loved the book! I had researched crying not too long ago and wrote an article on it: Crying: The Road Map to Empathy. The article deep dives into why we cry. Having prefaced this research before reading The Crying Book allowed me to find similarities in what Heather had to say and what I had found on my own. Needless to say, I found it very interesting and enlightening to read. You can read my “official” review down below.
The viscosity of my tears were thick and plenty while reading this transcendent examination of every single time Heather cried and the deep dive into “why we cry at all.” Heather Christle truly captures the ideation of tears, grief, and self-discovery. It is not simply a book about tears, but a logging of understanding, empathy, and vulnerability. Her entanglement of words, phrases, descriptions, and poetry creates an empathetic prose prone to producing tears that “blaze stark… breaking here and there into clusters of curves” leaving the reader wondering “when was the last time I cried and why?”
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
… and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t‘s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which d has never dreamt.
A real tear that you can taste, a moon that has nothing to do with crying. (The latter does not exist.)
Some people think of reading poems and stories as a way to practice responding to imagined circumstances, without having to risk the dangers of real life… Some people will write about one thing as a way of not writing about something else.
I fear that to write so much about crying will tempt a universal law of irony to invite tragedy into my life.