The authors included here contemplate how and why art, music, film, literature, theatre, theory, and material artifacts make us weep. The essays found within are often deeply personal, but also have broad implications for everyday life. What On the Verge of Tears offers are personal, cultural, and political ruminations on the tears we shed in our daily engagements with the world and its artifacts. It does not limit itself to very contemporary popular culture (as does Jenkins’ book) or material culture (as does Schwenger’s study).
It is not a history of tears (as is Lutz’s superb book) nor is its approach psychological/sociological (as is Nelson’s).
As a collection of essay by diverse hands, its point of view is multi-vocal. This book differs markedly from each of these others, however. Tom Lutz’s Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears, Judith Kay Nelson’s Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment, Peter Schwenger’s The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, and Henry Jenkins’ The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture also offer forays into this familiar, if not always entirely comfortable, emotional space. On the Verge of Tears is not the first book to think about crying. This book was born from that moment of recognition. They did agree, however, as did the readers who responded to the column, that crying over stories, and even “things,” is something that is a shared and familiar cultural practice. Some cried more over film, some television, some books some felt their tears to be a release, others to be a manipulation. The respondents to David’s initial survey-Michele Byers among them-didn’t agree on anything. “The Crying Game: Why Television Brings Us to Tears” asked us to consider that “age-old mystery”: tears. The idea for this book began with David Lavery’s 2007 column for.
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