really enjoyed this read as someone who cries a lot. 5/5

Me gustan los libros fragmentarios y este no puede serlo más. Una investigación sobre las lágrimas, el llanto y decenas de temas adyacentes y curiosidades varias. Muchas cosas me dejaron impasible, pero encontré algunos destellos.

This book was mesmerizing. In fits and starts but always lulling, Christle moves through memory, poetry, sorrow, dreams, and despair. 

I wish I’d read this book more slowly, to savor the fragments that it presents rather than devouring them for their connections, their fragile, terrible beauty.

Even before she named Plath as a poetic mother, her work walked the same footsteps of heartbreak at all the world. 

Woolf is mentioned too. So is Didion. And I would add to this list Jenny Slates book: “Little Weirds”. 

Favorite moments (of which there are many, brace yourself):

“As far as words go, /crying/ is louder and /weeping/ is wetter. When people explain the difference to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses- the plainness of cried, the velvet cloak of wept. I remember arguing once with a teacher who I stated /dreamt/ was incorrect, /dreamed/ the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which d has never dreamt” (12-13).

“The body at rest suddenly finds its feelings have caught up, and- as you’ve neglected them in favor of more practical concerns- they arrive loudly, demanding immediate physical expression” (28).

“”I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste- a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could suddenly be covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem- a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to paint the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger”” (29).

“I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real… I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body” (30). 

“A person who “cries for the moon” wants too much- wants, in fact, more wanting- weeps into the lack. You can’t make a wish upon the moon” (38).

“I imagined us into a triangle, each of us nestled in her own corner. It had to be isosceles. Scalene was too erratic, equilateral too composed. I could trust neither. I am pretending this is past tense, but honestly the feeling remains. I couldn’t cry, because I needed to be the angle of difference, the angle that made the whole just unbalanced enough to keep going” (69).

“/Despair/ recognizes its own ridiculousness, it’s emotional exaggeration. It invites you to say, like Anne of Green Gables, that you are in the “depths of despair.” It makes no space for shallows” (79).

“It is raining, not crying. There is enough grief without trying to wring tears from the moon” (100).

“Byzantine physicians wrote that you could recognize a werewolf by its tearlessness” (140).

“If I had a prayer, it would say, /Let this not be a mirror to the past, not a window to the future. Let each night be only itself/…” (142).

*despite my respect for and love of this book, I do take umbrage with the disdain for Flight of the Concords. Unfunny music?!

Kinda alienating tbh

It was ok… I had so much trouble relating honestly. I would say it’s a collection of facts about crying and sadness. The historical gleanings feel very telling about the author, sorta trapped in a cis, straight, got-a-book-deal, white femme perspective, even when she’s acknowledging it. I felt that it reinforced a lot of oppressive, imagination-less paradigms, as it cycled between stifling, removed, rationalist Protestant detachment and a sort of suggestive (but unexpressed) sentimentality. Like, the personal vignettes, in the beginning at least,  are only really sad because they  are in a book about crying?

 Both the experimental and connective potential of this book fell short, as a lot of the ideas and departures were under-developed and under-analyzed, but I didn’t feel the existential “whoomf” or liberatory experience I do with other under-stated texts. I did enjoy it enough to finish it. A lot of her personal stories felt oddly voyeuristic to listen to, which was perhaps an extension of the detachment in the book. 

I felt a lot of anxiety around her constant fighting with her partner, like “the cis are not ok” kinda extended panic.  Overall it was pretty boring, and I felt more alone after reading it, like I’d fallen for some promise of answers, and even questions, I didn’t get. It felt more like I was listening to NPR. I struggled a lot with who and how the author other-izes certain of her “subjects” in the book, like why she invoked diagnosis, treatment, and institutionalization in certain historical and family stories, but doesn’t speak directly to her experience with diagnosis and mental health labels. I was also surprised she went the entire book without talking about certain conditions and neurodivergences that make crying hard. 

The book ramps up suddenly in its weight, but also seemed to reinforce and naturalize threads of suicidal, tortured artists, like we have to carry this terrible emotional burden and the clock is always ticking on our survival and eventual demise by suicide. Like, one minute crying is an intellectual exercise that may or be not connected with the many meanings of sadness and then bam! we’re in a long fight for our lives now— strap in everyone, good luck! It felt pretty dismal by the end like “why am I trying to write poetry even?” 

I could see the book more as a set of writing prompts, like writing or reflecting from this collection? Idk, maybe I had high expectations as I love crying and was looking forward to a whole book on it, but I felt oddly vacant after reading it (and not in a peaceful or more enlightened way). 

This book reminded me of two others I've read this year, Maggie Nelson's Bluets (which fell a bit flat) and Sheila Heti's Pure Colour (which I loved). The Crying Book falls between these two. On the whole, the author succeeded in balancing the exploration of tears and human emotion  with personal memoir.