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The Crying Book
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The Crying Book
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The Crying Book
Ebook160 pages2 hours

The Crying Book

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

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About this ebook

  • The Crying Book is a brilliant, genre-bending, and inquisitive nonfiction look at tears—Why do we cry? What does it mean? Can tears be insincere?—and the inquiry weaves through a turbulent period in the author’s own life
  • Simmering beneath the author's wide-ranging exploration of tears is the narrative throughline of her attempts to get pregnant, her pregnancy and anxiety over inherited depression, and her new motherhood in the throes of depression
  • “They say perhaps we cry when language fails, when words can no longer adequately convey our hurt.” While reckoning with tumult in her own life—the death of a close friend, the birth of her first child—Christle probes the act of crying with radiant curiosity
  • This book is genuinely fun to read, despite (or perhaps because of!) its subject matter; it's delightful and endearing, funning and surprising and brimming with discovery, and the super-short sections—threads formatted as paragraphs or even sentences—mean you can whip through the book quickly.
  • For fans of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize series, Heidi Julavits, Eula Biss, or Maggie Nelson, as well as Insomnia by Marina Benjamin (Catapult), The Crying Book is poetic and intimate, while also deeply and astonishingly researched
  • The examples Christle presents of crying and tears are remarkable, harrowing, heartbreaking, and inspiring in equal measure: the racially weaponized nature of white women's tears, dismissed mother's tears, tears at a moment of national crisis, and more; they can also be delightful and surprising, like Joan Didion’s method for stopping tears
  • In beautiful ways, Christle's book is a poet's subject-specific commonplace book, with deeply satisfying intertextuality
  • The Crying Book has moments of glittering, winking humor: “Hard to feel you are too tragic a figure when the tears mix with snot. There is no glamour in honking.”
  • The Crying Book will include black-and-white photos throughout

    Bookseller Praise for The Crying Book

    "The Crying Book is a lyrical, literary, and marauding meditation on a human act with a long history of mystery and misunderstanding. Poet Heather Christle began researching and writing this sui generis social science memoir at a time when tears were most copious for her, while both grieving the suicide of a close friend and anxiously preparing for the birth of her daughter. What emerges from Christle’s exploration of the act of crying is both intimate and intellectual, particular and profound, as she dives into the significance of tears personally, scientifically, and historically." —Megan Bell, Underground Books (Carrollton, GA)

    "When, where, why do we cry? How is it that some are predisposed to cry little and others to weep endlessly? Why does it so often feel shameful? When does it relieve us, does it trap us in depression? Peaceful and powerful, The Crying Book is a poetic examination of the art of weeping. Poet Heather Christle meditates on tears, grief, in a graceful mourning song held together by personal experiences, scientific insight, and her most beloved—poetry. In the face of great loss, Christle’s account is crystalline and mystical, a necessary embrace for the bereaved, and validating manifesto to the tearful." —Mary Wahlmeier, The Raven Book Store (Lawrence, KS)

    "Heather Christle's The Crying Book is a beautiful exploration into why we cry, peeling back the layers of seemingly everyday moments in her life. Each short section gives you insight into either her thoughts, daily life, or a discovery she has made about crying. While at points it feels as if it meanders—in the most beautiful of ways—it always seems to circle back and connect together again. A sincere exploration. Readers will be as blown away by Christle's honest revelations as they will be by her beautiful prose." —Erin Gold, Pages Bookshop (Detroit, MI)

  • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateNov 5, 2019
    ISBN9781948226455
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for The Crying Book

    Rating: 3.695652169565218 out of 5 stars
    3.5/5

    23 ratings1 review

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    • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
      4/5
      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.