In 2013, researchers led by Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published a paper on “hedonic reversal,” a form of “benign masochism” in which people take pleasure in “initially negative experiences that the body (brain) falsely interprets as threatening.” Some of these experiences included eating a chili pepper or watching a slasher movie. The paper’s “most interesting” finding, however, was that people often enjoy the experience of sadness, and that many even delight in crying. Frequently, this pleasure was spurred by sad films, sad novels, sad music, and sad paintings. “More than any other hedonic reversal,” the researchers wrote, “the liking for sadness is engaged by works of art; it has an aesthetic quality.”
“The Crying Book,” by the poet Heather Christle, is a study of that quality, which Christle aims to both dissect and provoke. The book, which is built of fragments of varying lengths, examines the science, sociology, and history of weeping. Christle discusses a moth species that sups on elephant tears; why plane travellers sob in the air; the difference between basal, irritant, and psychogenic eye water. Woven among the facts are bits of memoir: the narrator, who suffers from depression, tries to get pregnant, and succeeds. (The book ends when her daughter is a young child.) At one point, Christle discovers that the Victorians did not actually collect their tears in glass vials, called lachrymatories; nonetheless, the image gives her a metaphor for her process. “This tear and this tear and this one,” she writes, describing the blocks of text that compose her book. “I want the act of reading these tears, of placing them alongside one another, to make . . . relationship emerge.”
What emerged in me, at first, was wariness. There can be something suspect about dolor, with its seam of gratification, and Christle’s self-awareness occasionally falters, so that her objective can feel less like catharsis than like a literary ode to wallowing. (In one passage, Christle surveys her “crybrary” of texts, which includes a volume with chapters titled “Crying at nothing but colors” and “Weeping over bluish leaves.” Oy.) But Christle anticipates this skepticism, the way grief can feel secretly thrilled at itself, and addresses it in several ways. The first is through humor. (Runny noses, Christle notes, are the enemy of tragic mystique.) The second strategy, which overlaps with the first, is a sincerity that makes room for the reader’s embarrassment, thereby neutralizing it. Shame, a sense of being compromised, clings to many of Christle’s disclosures. “Most days I cry more than I write about crying,” she admits. Yet her unguarded tone shifts the burden of that shame onto us, forcing a consideration of our own sympathy and distaste.
The subversion at work here feels related to the third strategy, which is to highlight how we tend to discount some tears and elevate others. A crying woman is quickly discredited, Christle observes; even as Christle sends up her own weepiness, she is justly scathing toward experts who would pathologize the expression of emotion. She traces, too, the ways in which white women’s tears have been used to persecute people of color and wonders whether men tend to experience their grief as rage. A reader relishes such moments of critique. The book’s structure lends itself to evocative factoids—“restitution for botched lacrimal surgeries are even mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi,” for example—and yet these morsels resonate most when they don’t rely on the intrinsic glamour of misery. In one striking passage, Christle quotes a psychologist, writing to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1905, who inquires if “the negro sheds tears” at all.
The book draws some voltage from the coincidence of its creation with Christle’s pregnancy. The parallel works in progress underline how the author deviates from the image of the calm, upbeat parent, who dries (or even studies) her baby’s tears without shedding any herself. “I worry I will be a colicky mother,” Christle admits, “because I am periodically overcome with complete, encompassing fear and despair, and when I am suffering thus, my crying can go on for hours.” Each bout of weeping could portend depression, a familiar demon returned. But “The Crying Book,” which suggests a fluidity to the roles of the vulnerable infant and self-sufficient parent, declines to tell a story about a mother who heroically suppresses her pain in order to raise her child. Instead, 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.
Christle also shows a poet’s concern for the properties of language. She notices “the plainness of cried” versus “the velvet rope of wept.” She dislikes terms like “depression,” “suicidal ideation,” and “anxiety,” because they “cast a staged or laboratory light.” There is power in holding grief at a remove, she knows—one thinks of Rose-Lynn Fisher, the artist who, photographing dried tears that she had placed under a microscope, revealed hidden landscapes—but “The Crying Book” seems determined to dissolve that remove: to press up against the edge of language, to push beyond representation into the real. “I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon,” Christle writes, quoting Jack Spicer. Weeping, which happens when words are not enough, belongs to this world of pure signification.
But transcending language is a tricky business. One might, moving beyond words, obtain an audience with Spicer’s moon, or one might find only darkness. This is the terror of tears; it is also the terror of depression, which rips everything apart. “Despair,” Christle claims, “is a kind of decomposition. When we want someone to stop crying and we are a stern governess with one recalcitrant pupil we instruct them, Compose yourself.” Christle’s challenge, then, is to compose a text about coming undone. Fragments are her solution. They allow her to simultaneously dismantle and construct her story: to break down and, at the same time, to pull herself together.
Between Maggie Nelson’s “The Argonauts,” Sarah Manguso’s “Ongoingness,” and, most recently, Carmen Maria Machado’s “In The Dream House,” the book told in fragments has been enjoying a sunlit few years. There’s something beguiling about the form, which feels alive and provisional. Relationships emerge, just as Christle predicts, and the associative logic of “this tear and this tear and this one” creates a dreamy flow, like ice skating through someone’s subconscious. Opportunities abound to drop in trivia—a feat which, done casually, generates the impression of an omnivorous intellect. What’s more, disrupting the linearity of narrative lifts each scene out of time, which is an experience people seek from both writing and life. In “The Argonauts,” Nelson hails the “autotelia” of moments that require no context and imply no consequences. She gives the example of finding herself erotically consumed by her baby, but not feeling the need “to do anything about it” (i.e., have sex). There is a seductive echo between Nelson’s aspirational vision of a life in instants and her creation of a text in pieces.
Nelson is the writer whose influence on Christle feels determinative. “The Argonauts” narrates the author’s romance with her fluidly gendered partner, who begins hormone therapy, taking testosterone, while Nelson carries their baby. Not only does that memoir, like “The Crying Book,” describe pregnancy and childbirth but Nelson, like Christle, has thought deeply about how motherhood can both shape a woman’s identity and dissipate it. “To let the baby out,” she writes, prefiguring Christle’s riff on decomposition, and also making it painfully literal, “you have to be willing to go to pieces.” Christle, fearing postpartum depression, points to Judith Butler’s characterization of sadness as “a kind of undoing”; Nelson quotes the poet Alice Notley, who writes, of her infant son: “he is born and I am undone.” But “The Argonauts” approaches the question of form with more curiosity than does “The Crying Book.” Though Christle is content to let “not story, but relationship emerge” from her fragments, Nelson asks whether omitting sections of a narrative serves to “make a fetish of the unsaid.”
This is a valid concern. The suggestiveness of silence often creates a headwind for authors, who might seem not to have earned their text’s mystery. (Not writing a sentence is much easier than writing a sentence, and a reader can easily get confused about when a book is being lazy and when it is channelling genius.) What saves “The Argonauts” is sharpness, rigor, and, most of all, its evocation of becoming. Nelson’s title alludes to Roland Barthes, who wrote about how the Greek heroes aboard the Argo continually replaced pieces of their ship; by the time the voyage was over, the vessel was “entirely new,” although it possessed the same “name and form.” Nelson is gesturing at her partner’s physical and emotional changes, and at her own, but the image seems germane to the book itself: planks slide in or out, but the craft sails on. In contrast, I often felt, reading “The Crying Book,” that Christle wanted to consecrate stillness. (“The body at rest suddenly finds its feelings have caught up,” she writes.) Where Nelson explores “the pleasure of . . . persistence,” of transformation sustained over time, Christle thinks in terms of discrete “occasions,” around which language hardens like ice. The result is less a journey than a set of paratactic ideas. The reader surfaces, as if from a crying session, sensing that something has been gained, but unsure what.
