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.“ -Katy Waldman, The New Yorker Rather than denying that self–pity can be pleasurable, she reveals how that pleasure comes from enfolding oneself in imagined care. 'Christle tenderly engages the unsavory aspects of sadness until they become less strange. Long–listed for the Believer Book Award for NonfictionĪ Georgia Author of the Year Awards Nominee Praise For This Book The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy. 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. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. 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.

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. 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.

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 is a visionary writer.” -Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks “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. A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book.” -Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias “A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears-exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended.

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