The Crying Book

“A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears—exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended... A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book.”  -  Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias

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. 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. 

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. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. 

"Christle tenderly engages the unsavoury 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.“  -  Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

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. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.