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The Crying Book

How poet Heather Christle’s book of tears helped me navigate grief.

Xi Chen
Literally Literary
5 min readAug 4, 2021

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Photo by Emma Trevisan on Unsplash

When Andrew died, I cried, and cried, and cried.

I cried every day for weeks, then months. I cried lying in bed, walking in the park, on the hospital floor.

It has been over two years. The only difference now is that the tears are unexpected, irregular. No one can save me from this sea of grief — not talk therapy, not antidepressants, not unconditional love, nor positive regard. Only time can dampen the tide, but even time cannot stop the wave’s crest from reaching my eyes.

As a writer, I had hoped that language would bring me ashore, that metaphor would reset the beating of my weeping heart and unearth me into a new life. This was a fallacy, a delusion that I just needed words and stories to express the meaning behind my crying, when in fact tears do the opposite. They instead break down language, signaling the presence of the inexpressible.

This is what struck me about the cover of Heather Christle’s The Crying Book — a book with big soulless eyes, staring straight out at the reader, hovering above a waterfall of misshapen tears, blue and purple with flashes of the cosmos, of the unknowable.

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Xi Chen
Xi Chen

Written by Xi Chen

I write essays about literary fiction.

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