Later, we see Tita crying all too frequently, in love and sickness and pain. I know Laura Esquivel must have when she wrote 'Like Water for Chocolate.' Lutz relates a passage in where the main character can be heard crying in the womb before she is even born. Readers will have to be impressed how fluidly he moves from such extremes as tears in the bible to modern day explanation of the physiology of emotion.Īs a reader, I appreciate how Lutz's discussion touched upon literary literary tears.ĭid the authors he mentioned - Hemingway, Eliot, Nathanael West - experience the same range of sensations of their characters when they typed thier stories.

Lutz covers the entire landscape of crying in religion, psychology, medicine and everyday life. 'Tears are the most substantial and yet the most fleeting, the most obvious and yet the most engimatic proof of our emotional lives. I thought I knew all about crying until I read Tom Lutz's book'Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears.' I'm sure everyone has experienced odd moments of tearing up at the most surprising of times and been left unable and confused for the loss of control. I am a part-time musician, an amateur photographer, and a full-time dilettante. I’m a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the UC Riverside, the founding editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, founder of The LARB Radio Hour, The LARB Quarterly Journal, The LARB/USC Publishing Workshop, and LARB Books. I am the author of two earlier books of travel narrative - And The Monkey Learned Nothing and Drinking Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World - the cultural histories Doing Nothing and Crying literary histories Cosmopolitan Vistas and American Nervousness, 1903 pieces for New York Times, LA Times, ZYZZYVA, Exquisite Corpse, New Republic, Salon, Black Clock, Iowa Review, and other places. I've just sent a sequel, STILL SLIPPY, to my agent.

My first novel, BORN SLIPPY: A NOVEL was published in January, 2020 (Repeater/PRH).

A volume of photographic portraits of people I've met on the road is coming out in February 2022, PORTRAITS: MOMENTS OF INTIMACY ON THE ROAD.Ī book of philosophical and literary critical reflections, AIMLESSNESS, was published in January 2021 by Columbia University Press. I have just published the third volume of my travel writing, THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS ()October 2021).

Crying by Tom Lutz