And now it’s time to have a good cry

Helen Brown admires a poet’s brilliant (and oddly uplifting) study of what happens when we weep

RTHE CRYING BOOK by Heather Christle 208pp, Corsair, £14.99, ebook £9.99

eviewing a crying doll online, Amazon customers expressed disappointment “that her mouth didn’t move when crying or laughing”, and about the lack of “even flow”. Among the complaints, the American poet Heather Christle found one she felt could be applied to herself on some days: “The doll will cry but then nothing else. After it cries you hear a mechanical sound inside the doll (like it is trying to do something) but nothing happens. The sound just keeps grinding until you manually turn it off.”

In the five years it took Christle to write her wonderful meditation on the science, art and cultural history of crying, a series of life-changing events triggered her own tears. She wept through her pregnancy and the challenges of early motherhood. Depression – perhaps a form of bipolar – was diagnosed and a close friend committed suicide.

Although we often talk about the benefits of a “good cry” and “getting it all out”, Christle noticed that the experience did not deliver the relief she craved. “I sometimes imagine a metaphysical strainer I could rinse my body through,” she says, “until I am whole and clean in the sink and all the despair is held separate and dripping above. I imagine I could toss it away.”

Collecting and concentrating her thoughts in perfectly formed droplets of prose – two or three short paragraphs per page – Christle informs us that the human body makes three kinds of tears. “Basal” tears are the lubricant that keeps our eyes wet. “Irritant” tears are a defensive reaction to foreign substances. “Psychogenic” tears well up in response to a variety of emotions and contain more protein than the other types of tears. It is possible that the greater viscosity of these tears makes them slower to fall and more likely to solicit the support of others.

Christle carefully pipettes a series of arresting facts before us: in Japan, you can pay a handsome man to wipe away your tears, or rent a room specially designed for crying; the bodies of brain-dead patients sometimes produce tears when their organs are removed; when the tears are Photoshopped out, we find it difficult to tell the difference between photographs of people laughing and crying.

We learn that, on the moon, where gravity exerts only one sixth of the force it does on earth, tears drift downwards like snow.

The astronaut Alan Shepard cried up there looking back at the earth in 1971.

Leaving the planet’s surface elicits a similar response from many of us. A survey of Virgin Atlantic passengers found that 41 per cent of men “said they’d hidden under blankets to hide their tears while women “reported hiding tears by pretending to have something in their eye”.

Anthropologically detached and angry by turns, Christle exposes the absurd differences between the

On the moon, with one-sixth of earth’s gravity, tears drift downwards like snow

cry-hustle…/ And there’s nothing else you can do.”

Most of the crying dolls you find online are female. They are also most likely to be caucasian. “White tears” are those shed by white people realising the enormity of systemic racism. In 1908 Alvin Borgquist published the first in-depth psychological study of crying. One question he struggled to answer was “Whether the negro sheds tears”. When the New York poet Lucille Clifton heard about this, she was driven to the literary equivalent of banging her head against the desk: “they do/ they do/ they do”.

Christle splashes her book liberally with quick quotations from fellow poets – famous and less so – leaving it up to the reader to chase down the whole poems online, if inclined. She circles the sorrow that has often overwhelmed her colleagues. The teacher who taught Christle about Sylvia Plath jumped to her death from a stadium in 2009. She thinks the stadium is an odd choice and remembers the confessional poet John Berryman, who jumped from a bridge in 1972. “A bridge,” she feels, “is profound, dense with connections. So dense, perhaps, that it is more metaphor than structure. John Berryman leapt from a metaphor and perished.”

I loved the way Christle combines practical advice with lyrical observation: “If you see a person crying near a car, you may need to offer help. If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held. If you cry in a car while it’s raining, it feels like the windshield wipers should tend too to your face.” She made me laugh, too: “I believe in ending sentences with a preposition in order to give the ideas a way out.” In fact, The Crying Book has an extraordinary lightness for such a soggy subject. I closed it with a smile, though it inevitably ends in tears.

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