Reading and Crying

What I'm up to this week

Hello.

It’s been a week. I have one child recovering from COVID and another child suffering from what we may describe as the state of being 14. My husband’s beloved Philadelphia Phillies beat the Atlanta Braves last night. And meanwhile, we are all living with the awareness that innocent humans in another part of the world are being violently killed.

So let me tell you about The Crying Book by Heather Christle.

I got this book yesterday on my first trip out of the house since my daughter’s COVID results came back positive. It was not the book I was looking for, but then I noticed it sitting on the shelf beside a tidy row of Rachel Cusk. As a big fan of books with “book” in the title, I had to pick it up. (See Ruth Ozeki; see also Milan Kundera.)

When I read that The Crying Book originated with the author’s idea to make a map of every place she’d cried, my mind began to whir with various locations in which I have cried. How many bathrooms, bedrooms, closets, bus stops, movie theaters, gyms, playgrounds, doctor’s offices, principal’s offices, Zoom meetings, office cubicles, parking lots, and restaurants have been the setting for your tears?

I love what Christle writes about crying in the kitchen:

A kitchen is the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears. A bedroom is too easy, a bathroom too private, a living room too formal. If someone falls to pieces in the kitchen, in the space of work and nourishment, they must be truly coming undone. The bright lights offer no comfort, only illuminate. The floor should be vinyl and cold.

But don’t think this book is only about where tears happen (everywhere, obvs). It’s about all aspects of crying—the science behind tears; the politics of tears, gender, and race; tears in poetry; Amazon reviews of dolls that cry, disappointingly, out of only one eye. It’s also about motherhood, friendship, marriage, and mental health, as Christle weaves in her own story behind the research she compiles in what her husband refers to as the “crybrary.”

Perhaps I do not need to point out that Christle is a poet. As such, The Crying Book would be good company on a reading list with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book I keep an extra copy of on my shelf in case I encounter a kindred spirit who hasn’t read it yet. I am a fan of this genre, a sort of hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir.

At less than 200 pages (including acknowledgements and endnotes) The Crying Book is quite slim yet it will provoke much thought.

Other interesting things

• Thinking of places to cry reminds me of places where people engage in other bodily emissions. Did you know that there is a Japanese expression for pooping in bookstores?

• The book that I was looking for when I got derailed by The Crying Book is a new biography of Larry McMurtry. The issuance of a new biography is one of the rare occasions that I buy a new hardcover book, because I want the glossy, full color pictures in the center. I want to call this part of the book a “centerfold,” but that doesn’t seem right, except for maybe it is the right term for the topless picture of Paul Newman as Hud that you will find in Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty.

• Yiyun Li’s “The Ability to Cry” is a perfect personal essay. Like Li, I lost the ability to cry easily somewhere along the path to adulthood. Interesting that both Li and Christle cite to Alice in Wonderland: “If I shed one tear, I might become Alice, swimming in an ocean of my tears.”

• As a Jewish family, we are inundated with resources for talking to our children about the war in Israel, and I’m grateful for the support. Here are websites with suggestions for supporting young people during a crisis and talking to kids and teens about the Israel-Hamas war and what’s happening in Israel right now.

Bye for now.