The Crying Book by Heather Christle
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.
The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
Long-listed for the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction
One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books in Lifestyle in Fall 2019
Independent Book Review, 1 of 30 Impressive Indie Press Books of the Year
Bustle, 1 of 11 New Memoirs for Your Fall Reading List
Paperback Paris, 1 of 12 New Books You'll Want to Bring Outside This Season
All Arts, 1 of 10 New Books to Read This Month A Georgia Author of the Year Awards Nominee
"Christle tenderly engages the unsavory aspects of sadness until they become less strange. Rather than denying that self-pity can be pleasurable, she reveals how that pleasure comes from enfolding oneself in imagined care. The book inhabits an ambivalent zone between the acknowledgment that adult women have needs and the author's fear that she has too many needs nevertheless . . . The Crying Book seems determined to . . . press up against the edge of language, to push beyond representation into the real. " --Katy Waldman, The New Yorker