There are playlists on YouTube designed specifically to make people cry. Usually the videos are some combination of dogs dying, soldiers coming home from war, and Thai life insurance commercials, which are bizarrely harrowing. People who claim never to cry over circumstances in their own lives will confess to the minute and second when they “lost it.” A comment on an article about the 19-video “No Cry Challenge”: “I made it to like 2:50 before sobbing, by 4 min I was sobbing uncontrollably.. I needed to, I feel better.”
Challenge makes it sound like the point is to try not to cry, but I think most people watch because they do want to cry. I read a thread on Metafilter last year where the OP (Internet slang for “original poster”) was looking for books that make you cry:
I want to cry my eyes out over a book. It’s been a long time since I have and I need the catharsis.
I need something along the tearjerking lines of Old Yeller, but for adults.
Stuff surrounding the themes of love and loss is a really obvious choice. I nearly always cry over really touching and unselfish displays of loyalty and/or love. (In either a platonic or romantic sense.) Bonus points for existentialism, bittersweetness, and/or touching on the theme of freedom.
But really, if it made you sob and sob and say at some point, “Wow I can’t stand this” it’s probably golden.
Though I’ll cry during almost any movie, especially if I’m on a plane, I can count on one hand the number of times a book has made me weep. The first was Gone With the Wind; I believe I wept twice, once when Scarlett calls for Rhett all night and he doesn’t come, and again when Melanie dies. Perhaps I just wept continuously for a couple of hundred pages. Another memorable weep read, many years later, was The House of Mirth; I was about ten pages from the end when we landed at Logan Airport; I had to cut my sobbing short to deplane, then resume it again that night in bed.
I enjoy sobbing along with films and television. I love when the person you’re rooting for wins a reality show. Probably my favorite emotion to witness is tearful pride, which is why I’m addicted to vocal competition shows like The Voice, all the more so when the contestant is young and their parents or siblings can’t stop crying during the performance. Watch this little girl from Germany sing “I Will Always Love You”; look at her mother imploding backstage; look at that goddamn teddy bear in her pocket.
I have watched this video dozens of times, full of awe and something like a deep nostalgia. (Why? She’s not me and I don’t really sing, unless you count enthusiastic karaoke.) There should be a name for an emotional mix of happiness and sadness – as though you’re overjoyed to be so sad, or are witnessing your own happiness from a tragic distance.
I got interested in Master Chef Junior when I saw someone on Twitter say the finale made them sob. I watched a few episodes on Hulu. What was immediately striking about the show was the way all the children, both boys and girls, cry openly when it’s their turn to go home. There is no visible shame on the part of the crying child, and no shaming on the part of the other children; in fact they usually cry right along with them in sympathy. (Contestants also flout the first rule of reality television, declaring “I’m here to win, but I’m also here to make friends.”) Adults, of course, treat crying in public, unless you’re at the funeral of a close friend or family member, as roughly as embarrassing/disgusting as public vomiting. Most people, when they see a stranger crying, react with a kind of panicked indifference. At the Houston airport in 2002, my brother waited with me at the baggage claim until it was quite clear my bag had not made it back from Rome; as we moved to file a report he hissed at me “Don’t cry!”
I’ve never seen most people I know cry. For kids, even older kids, it is not uncommon to cry in front of your friends; up until college, I saw all of my close friends cry at one point or another. There was even a period, in junior high, when having a full-on emotional breakdown at a party was rather in vogue. This was right around the same time that parties turned co-ed and often featured a DJ. Later in the night, usually shortly before or after the last dance, one of us would pick a fight with another girl over some slight, real or imagined; after enough tears, accusations, and general attention-seeking drama had been shared, we would usually make up and hug it out. Initially, the most dramatic girls seemed to be the most emotionally mature; it was something to be admired – we were impressed they could drum up that much resentment. But after a year or two, the pattern became obvious, and the more mature stance was to position yourself as above such outbursts. I seem to remember once being the target of an outburst, but never the instigator. Regardless, I enjoyed both the attention and the show, and couldn’t fully bring myself to scorn the phony drama. I’ve done a little acting, and the fact is, when you go through the motions of being upset, you genuinely start to feel upset. It’s not as hard as you think to cry on cue.
I like to ask people if they remember the last time they cried. Since I rarely go a week without crying at least a little, I always remember. The last time I cried was during the finale of the most recent season of Top Chef. I was happy (proud?) that a woman won. Can you be proud of a stranger? My eyes filled with tears, they ran down my cheeks, I wiped them away. It was quick, silent crying. The last time I cried before that was after getting off the phone with my gynecologist’s receptionist and learning that I could not, at my approaching appointment, get my IUD replaced. The approaching appointment would be a LEEP procedure to electrosurgically remove several layers of potentially precancerous cells from my cervix. During the cervical biopsy I’d undergone a couple of weeks before, the nurse practitioner had accidentally yanked my IUD out with her comically huge biopsy scissors; she left the device sitting in the sink, in a small pool of blood, then left the room so I could get dressed again. I hadn’t cried then, or when she told me I needed the LEEP, but I cried knowing I’d have to go back once again to get a new IUD, and be subjected for the third time in a month to the humiliation of lying flat on my back, naked from the waist down, with my legs in stirrups. (I’ve often wished gynecological exam tables were as well-designed as dentists’ chairs.) This was a noisier, more intense cry, but equally brief; had my husband, John, been awake, I might have drawn it out a little longer, but I was alone, so I sobbed with efficiency.
I have noticed that there’s something about speech that can trigger tears. I’ll hear a story, and know intellectually that the story is sad, but I won’t actually cry until I tell it to someone else. Is it the speech act itself, or the presence of an audience? In college, I learned that a girl from my high school, someone I knew but hadn’t kept in touch with, had been in a bad car accident; her right arm was severed off. I was shocked when I heard it, but not sad, exactly. Later, I repeated the story to my mother; I remember we were driving at the time, and I was in the passenger seat, as the girl would have been. I started crying when I said the word “severed,” which had not seemed quite so brutal in my head as it did it my mouth. It’s not often we have cause to say the word “severed.” Several years ago, my friend Kevin’s wife Katie was almost crushed when a gallery wall fell on top of her; her pelvis was shattered. She has said she didn’t recognize the animal scream that came out of her. When Kevin called their families to tell them what had happened, he couldn’t get it out; he’d try to speak and start sobbing. More than once, mentioning this story offhand to someone else, I’ve gotten unexpectedly choked up, like I can only realize how close she came to being killed or paralyzed when I’m vocalizing it.
The writer Leigh Stein once told me that she cried when she learned what Timothy McVeigh’s last meal was: two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream. “That’s exactly what I would eat!” she said. This would be her trigger if she needed to cry for a scene. I find the details of last meals almost unbearably poignant. Karla Faye Tucker’s last meal request was a peach, a banana, and a garden salad with ranch dressing. Ranch dressing! She was executed in Texas, which no longer honors last meal requests. This infuriates me.
When I questionnaire myself, in the style of Proust, the answer to “What would you think about if you needed to cry on cue?” changes every few years. Once, on a Sunday night in Boston, I had to take John to the ER with food poisoning. While we were waiting in the triage area, a man and a woman, an old couple, were rolled in on gurneys; they’d clearly been in an accident. The woman was wordlessly moaning, and the man kept saying, “Where’s my wife? I want to talk to my wife.” Someone finally responded “She’s right over there, she can hear you,” and he called out, “I’m sorry!” Then they rolled the woman off into surgery, presumably, while the man continued to say, “Where’s my wife? I want to be near my wife.” He couldn’t turn his head because of a brace around his neck. They finally rolled him away too. It felt like a hospital scene in a movie, a horrific, if scripted, glimpse into the lives of strangers. In a movie, however, it wouldn’t have been sad, merely horrific, since you’d have no attachment to these minor characters. As it is, it’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. John was lying on one of those shitty hospital beds, nauseated and dehydrated beyond belief, but I’d started crying, and he was comforting me.
I have always hated Sundays. Everything seems worse on Sunday nights, just like everything seems worse when you wake up at 3 a.m., each obligation and annoyance in your life a heavier burden. The worst kind of tears are frustration tears, when you cross the can’t-take-it-anymore threshold for some usually trivial reason, an inaccurate medical bill or horrible customer service agent. I’d rather cry from physical pain than frustration, though I can’t remember the last time I was injured badly enough to cry. I cried a little when I sprained my ankle doing long jump in high school, but I’ve never broken a bone. When I was 26, I got 13 stitches in my chin after fainting toward a French door and breaking a pane of glass with my face. Amazingly, this did not hurt at all. Not at the time, when I was unconscious, and not later, at any point during the stitching up or removal of stitches. The lack of pain, and the fact that I didn’t actually experience the fall, makes the “memory” cinematic; I picture it happening from the vantage point of the bed in the room; I see me stumble from the bathroom to the French door and down to the hardwood floor, where I later woke up, or was shaken awake.
Men can’t stand to see women cry, in the same way that parents can’t stand to see their children cry. We learn the value of performative crying at a very young age. I suspect all women, if not all men, have snuck a look in the mirror while crying. Rearview mirrors, restaurant bathroom mirrors. “A woman must continually watch herself,” John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing. “Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.” I’ve found that looking in the mirror is a very good way to stop crying. So, just as you can never see yourself in the mirror with your eyes closed, you can never watch yourself weeping in the mirror; instead you see how you look just after.
“There should be a name for an emotional mix of happiness and sadness…” = SAUDADE, my favorite of all emotions! http://www.npr.org/blogs/altlatino/2014/02/28/282…
Oooh, perfect!!
One of the lines I quote most from Parks and Rec is when Chris Trager says “I can’t believe I wasted this whole party in the back room being happy-sad!” That is basically the story of my whole life.
I’m probably not a good person to ask, because I cry (or at least get verklempt) on the daily, but
Books That Make Me Weep
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (specifically the scene where he walks into the the Forbidden Forest)
Beloved
Code Name Verity
The Amber Spyglass
An Untamed State
That last one, I scared the dickens out of Mr.BHam when I quietly placed the book down, waited a beat, then burst into loud tears.
“…that scene where he walks into the Forbidden Forest.”
With you 100%. I just got chills.
FORBIDDEN FOREST SCENE. I had cried a little before that b/c Dobby, but “walking into the forest” was the point where I had to put the book down for a second and just cry it out.
Right there with you. I thank all that is good that HP:DH came out over the summer while I was still in college, so I could get it at midnight and read all night and cry my stupid little heart out.
I’m also quite grateful that I lived with my boyfriend that summer but in separate bedrooms (long story), so he could sleep while I cried quietly in the room next to his, and then came in the next morning and said “Good morning, no spoilers but was it good?” and I could tell him “I cried eleventy billion times, it was so good!” and he went off to his Real Job and I slept all day with my winter coats hung over the windows..
I can’t barely think about Code Name Verity without my eyes welling up. And now I’m thinking about how the plot resolves as it does (vague spoiler vague spoiler vague spoiler) because one friend can recognize her best friend from the sound of her crying and now I think I need to cry too.
Oh god. Code Name Verity for sure. I was not expecting to cry as hard as I did at the end of that book. Also, Eleanor & Park.
“Does it hurt?” I usually start feeling shaken as soon as the Forbidden Forest scene starts, but as soon as I read that line I lose it, every time…
Time Traveler’s Wife made me cry too, the whole last 50-100 pages. The last one that really made me sob was Baltasar and Blimunda, by Jose Saramago.
I also cry at ~95% of movies.
The Book Thief, always.
YES.
The vast majority of that list has made me weep in ways that frightened both myself and others.
The ending of The Amber Spyglass definitely made me cry, but for some reason the ending of The Subtle Knife made me cry even harder. (AAAAAAAAUGH LEE SCORESBY AND HESTER.) We won’t talk about what a mess I was by the time I got to the end of Code Name Verity.
Literally I had to pull over on the highway once because I was listening to The Subtle Knife and Lee and Hester and then I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. LEE. HESTER.
I had to put the book down, for the same reason.
I finished Code Name Verity while on a train. This meant I ended up crying in public.
You all just made me tear up just reading about reading some of those passages.
Christ, The Time Traveler’s Wife made me cry so hard I still feel angry about it.
I second Code Name Verity. Also:
Gilead
Olive Kitteridge
And the title story in Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
OH! Crying when having to say something out loud.
I think speaking a thing manifests it, for me.
If I ever feel like a good cry, I’ll queue up the ending of It’s A Wonderful Life, linked here for your convenience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxNXtjGY_Us
That whole movie makes me cry.
“Don’t hit my sore ear again!”
<////3
Last time I cried: This morning, while playing and singing a very emotional song on the guitar. I did it on purpose because I was depressed and needed to feel something. And I was terrified my roommate would come home while that was happening.
Things I would call to mind to cry on cue: If I want happy, Ben and Leslie’s engagement. Sad: Dumbledore dying.
Also, my best friend has more than once remarked that I look really attractive when I’m crying. I assume it’s because I’m less self conscious and my muscles relax, or something. There was one time a few days after I had been furious and screaming at him, and he was like “you know, I was actually distracted while you were screaming at me because I couldn’t get over how beautiful you looked”. So that’s odd.
That’s a good superpower. One for the “special skills” section of your resume.
I see your Ben and Leslie’s engagement, and raise you April and Andy’s wedding. Every time I hear the opening strains of “April Come She Will” I’m done for. EVERY TIME.
Oh, that one too. And also when April and Andy get to the Grand Canyon together.
The engagement is still my #1 though. Maybe I’m gullible (OK definitely) but they legitimately had me worried that they might break up during that episode, and I was TOTALLY surprised when he proposed. And it was just so perfectly done, the way they had Jerry’s heart attack get you thinking about how life is short and love is so important. . .I was dressed in a tutu on my way to a Halloween party, crying my eyes out.
Ohhhh, lord, the whole “End of the World Party” episode just kills me in every possible way.
“Where’s all the faces? Of the….of the presidents.”
This thread has gotten me thinking that there should be a playlist function in Netflix like on Spotify, so you can put together episodes of different things for different emotions. I wanna watch these Parks and Recs interspersed with some of the key Jim and Pam Office moments and the 30 Rock where Liz gets married and other comforting television moments.
Wait. Yes. This is the best idea. There can be the sitcom-crying playlist (happy adorable “why isn’t real life like this” crying), the sci-fi dramas crying playlist, the “movies like Hotel Rwanda and the Pianist” crying playlist…you’re hired.
Update: I just got distinctly teary-eyed at work thinking about all of these fictional moments. Geez.
In the P&R finale, I was keeping it together pretty well… but then Ben announced that Leslie was running and she gave him that look and wow here I go again just thinking about it,
Also, that no cry challenge is no joke. Danny and Annie from StoryCorps? Beginning of Up? Thai Life Insurance with the Deaf father?
:”””””””'(
I literally cry at every StoryCorps, even when, at the outset, it’s a subject I think to myself, “I can get through this. This one will be fine.” NOPE.
Thai life insurance commercials are like Titanic in miniature.
Beginning of Up! Noooo! Watched it for the first time and just wept, snottily and constantly, for the whole rest of the movie as I was so traumatised by the beginning. My husband tried to watch the movie with me but was more distracted/worried by my excessive leakiness.
Um, “Men can’t stand to see women cry, in the same way that parents can’t stand to see their children cry.” What? I’m kind of disturbed by that assertion…
Er, and no I have snuck a look in a mirror or similar while crying. #notallwomen
As far as my recipe for a cathartic cry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zoKAnFaO44 Every. Single. Time.
I’ve had so many boyfriends, guy friends, and male relatives get very upset when I cry that I can see where she’s coming from here. Of course, they’re usually actually mad that I’m crying (which is messed up) because they believe I’m crying AT them or on purpose to manipulate them. As a person who cries at the drop of a hat, this makes me even more upset so I’ve definitely ended friendships when guys couldn’t handle that sometimes I’m going to cry.
I hear you on the menfolk believe the crying was purposefully at them.
as a fellow cry-at-the-drop-of-a-hat person, this always makes me ANGRY because i dont want to cry, i want to have a straight argument with you, and yet here i am crying against my will and you are interpreting this as a PLOY. Before i was frustrated, now i am ANGRY FOR TWO SEPARATE REASONS.
I had to have serious words about this with my current dude early in, but he gets it now and we’ve found really pleasantly simple ways to argue, which is nice. consequently i feel less pressure to not cry and actually cry less!
I have noticed that men are more likely to treat me crying as if I’m on fire and need to be put out, whereas women are more likely to take a ‘get it all out!’ approach. I agree that it sounds a little essentialist but I see where she’s coming from too– men are socialized to not be comfortable with or used to tears, from themselves or anyone else.
It was just the over-generalization that bugged me. Like parents might react to a child’s cry in certain ways because 1) infants can’t use their words, so it’s basically how they get what they need 2) the basic function of parents is to provide for the needs of their children (food, shelter, emotional bonding) : men as some big amorphous unit do not have the same reaction to women (all women? women they know? women on the subway?) crying as parents do to their own children crying. It’s just a strange blanket statement.
Yeah I hear ya. It is overly general and you’re right that the comparison doesn’t quite work. I don’t think it’s in the same way that a parent can’t stand to see their child cry.
I’m female, but not a crier, I’ve never cried easily. My partner is a woman who cries like once a week. I relate SO MUCH to dumb men who don’t understand criers. At first, I was like “OMG put out the fire noooo” every time, but I’ve finally learned that crying means something completely different to her. Crying is pretty much a totally different emotion for Criers vs Non-Criers.
To her, crying is basically a facial expression which can double as a coping technique. The threshold is pretty low, like on a sadness scale from 1 to 10 the crying happens at 3 or so. To me, crying is what happens to a person when they’re absolutely, totally unable to cope, way more similar to having a panic attack than to having a facial expression (and there’s literally nothing good about panic attacks, so of course crying is an emergency!). Sadness scale: goes up to eleven.
I think the fear of manipulation happens because of the sadness scale. If someone displays an eleven out of ten level of sadness because of an everyday experience, that means something’s seriously wrong, right? It has to be either a mental breakdown, or else they’re acting out to overwhelm the people around them! Buuut if crying happens at their 3, they’re okay and everything’s fine, just fine (as I try to remind myself to stop freaking out when my GF cries).
That makes a lot of sense! I will definitely end up explaining that to some men in my life– one even told me he never cries unless he is totally freaking out and having a panic attack. It weirdly reminds me of puking– I know lots of people who puke a lot, like every time they have a few drinks, but I only puke if I am very very sick or so drunk that I’m blacked out, so puking confuses and freaks me out and is a Terrible Thing, whereas other people are just like “I puked and now I feel better!”.
Yes, puking is a GREAT simile! (Metaphor? Allegory?? Thing That Is Like Other Thing???) Confusing, terrible, ominous sign of wrongness, or dumb body stuff that just happens? So different for different people!
Oh wow, that’s so true and makes so much sense. If I throw up once I take it as a sign that I am Probably Dying (even if I just drank a little too much of the wrong thing or whatever) and refuse to do anything for 24 hours. Puking = at least one sick day off from work, maybe two.
Meanwhile, my friend is the undisputed master of the puke-and-rally. She’ll drink two long island iced teas, disappear to the bathroom, come back and casually mention that she just threw up, and drink two more. I’m afraid of her.
I know it’s fairly obvious, but I outright WEPT reading The Fault in Our Stars. I’m also a big TV show cryer (crier?) and while I frequently tear up or shed a few silent tears during the course of my weekly TV viewing, I was A TRAIN WRECK after last season’s Doctor Who finale. Not the Christmas special, the one where SPOILERS Clara and the Doctor part ways, both hiding their abject sadness from each other. END SPOILER I was out of control sobbing.
My grandmother DOESN’T CRY. We’ve actually had conversations about it. Her mother died when she was very young, and she thinks that has something to do with it. She said she’s cried maybe a handful of times since her mother died. She says she feels the emotion deeply but tears just don’t come.
I went through a stage as a kid where I didn’t cry very much. My friends would cry in movies and stuff and I felt emotionally inadequate because movies never made me cry. I would actually fake that I was crying at the movies. Then I saw A League of Their Own and totally cried and since then have cried easily in movies, TV shows, even commercials. Once I turned on the TV and the Golden Globes was on and Renee Zellweger was in the middle of making her acceptance speech and I started crying. I don’t even like Renee Zellweger very much!!!
I blame Terms of Endearment. I hadn’t cried at any movie before that (well maybe Bambi as a tiny person but that’s understandable), but since that film I am non-stop with the tears. I pretty much sobbed my way through Deathly Hallows (book) and had to stop numerous times to wipe my eyes so I could actually read.
I do that too! Where you’re crying and you go, “But I don’t even like person/character/product that much! Why am I crying?”
That happened with me too! For me it was Moulin Rouge which opened the floodgates. Before that I felt emotionally inadequate like you did, but ever since then tears come much more easily, and as the years go by I get more and more emotional. It’s gotten to the point where I automatically tear up if I see the most minor of kid characters upset or in danger in a movie.
Moulin Rouge was one of the first movies to wrench tears out of me too! The other two were Big Fish and Love Actually. Middle school was a very tear-filled time for me.
I hate Love Actually but watch it every Christmas anyway and always cry.
“Finding out which part of Love Actually will make me cry this year” is like my messed-up Christmas tradition, at this point.
Emma Thompson’s storyline, while obviously always the most gutting one, has been the real tearjerker for me these past few years. Maybe I’m getting old or something?
But Colin Firth’s always brings out the uncontrollable happy-sobbing.
I read The Fault in the Stars all in one sitting and was dehydrated at the end of it. I CRIED ALL THE WATER OUT OF MY BODY.
I am a huge book/TV show/movie crier, and while I haven’t been very invested in the last few seasons of Doctor Who, there are episodes in seasons 1-6 that are my go-to “I need a cry” fixes. To wit: Father’s Day, Parting of the Ways, Doomsday (DON’T GET ME STARTED), Vincent and the Doctor, The Big Bang, and The Doctor’s Wife.
Oh god, Vincent and the Doctor is my favourite episode, but I just sob every time, when they take him into the gallery and he sees all his work..gah, now I feel all teary!
TRUE STORY: I recently saw the sunflowers painting (the “For Amy”) one in the art museum and just burst into tears in public, nbd.
For me it’s the end of The Amber Spyglass. Not to spoil anything for anyone, but you’ll know what I mean if you’ve read it.
Oh god, yes. The only thing in the trilogy that tops it for me is (being vague and trying to keep this equally spoiler-free for people) a scene near the end of The Subtle Knife. I can’t even think about “We’re a-helpin’ Lyra” without welling up.
I love this so much. It says a lot of true things about crying that I’ve just never thought about before (the crying at telling someone else? I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve done that).
I’ve been able to resist clicking on all those crying challenge videos that keep appearing on my fb feed, but I know they’d make me a sobbing mess. I’ve gone to see movies by myself twice this year on purpose because I knew I’d be crying through them and didn’t want to inflict my sobbing self on a friend.
(Also the number of times I’ve watched The Last Call episode of The Good Wife this year is kind of embarrassing and probably speaks to the number of times I’ve needed a good cathartic cry)
This 1-minute video is all takes for me. Also: remembering Iroh singing the song, thinking about that story. etc. Started sobbing 20 seconds in while rewatching the video just now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmZRsCIUsE
Have you seen Grave of the Fireflies? Just thinking about the scene where the girl puts water in her little candy box and shakes it to make “juice” fucks me up.
oh I bawled aaaallll through grave of the fireflies. I don’t remember that scene though! I don’t really remember much of that movie except TRAGIC CHILDREN OMMMMGGGG, which I assume is a defense mechanism on the part of my brain so I don’t spend the rest of my life crying.
oh goddammit I did not need to be welling up at work right now. And I’m not even watching it, just remembering! Iroh whyyy must you inspire such verklempitude in me?
I always cry at:
The beginning of ‘Up’
Jessie’s song in ‘Toy Story 2’
I cried twice when I watched Buffy this weekend; once at the end of ‘The Gift’, and once on the line ‘I think I was in…heaven’ from Once More with Feeling.
I cry a lot at films/tv/books, but usually silent weeping. However, I went to see a film over the weekend called ‘Catch Me Daddy’, in which the main plot circles around an honour killing. The final scene made me sob in a way I haven’t for a long time, at anything, and caught me completely offguard. It wasn’t a cathartic cry though, and instead something that’s been haunting me over the last couple of days, to the point I’m slightly hesitating recommending the film despite the fact that it was brilliant in so many ways – I think you really have to be in an emotionally strong place to watch it!
All the books I have ever cried at:
Little Women, a little, at the obvious part
Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, but not the part you’re thinking of. It was when whatserface, America’s character, said something like, “How come so-and-so visits his dad in prison once a month and my dad can’t visit me more than once a year?”
And I just bawled like a baby at the end of Walk Two Moons. Jeez, that book, guys.
For me it’s that bit in the second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book where Bee and her grandmother finally reconnect and her grandmother says “sometimes it’s when we need love the most that we treat the people we love the worst.” Those Pants books, I tell you. Even the newest one where they’re all grown up.
And YES Walk Two Moons. Oh wow.
Ooh, there’s a new one? I’m going to seek that out!
(WAIT, no, just read the synopsis and recoiled in horror.)
Oh man, Walk Two Moons made me sob.
I’m not a big book crier, but If You Come Softly absolutely wrecked me. I also cried for basically the entirety of the West Wing finale.
Oh god, If You Come Softly. So devastating.
WALK TWO MOONS, holy shit yes. Sobfest of the highest degree.
One year for forensics/speech team I did a reading of the short story Eleven by Sandra Cisneros and it was not uncommon for there to be at least one person in the audience crying by the end. The story is such a universally relatable one about being young, powerless, and humiliated. In the story a girl is forced to wear a sweater that is horrible and ugly because the teacher thinks it’s hers and the girl doesn’t know how to tell the teacher that it’s not her sweater and so she just starts sobbing in front of her class on her birthday. Thinking about it now still makes me feel uncomfortable. If you want a good cry with fair warning that you might flashback to horrible moments in elementary school, I highly suggest it.
The last time I actually cried tears was after watching the episode of Leverage where the OT3 goes to Washington. I couldn’t even identify the emotion I was having, but I was sure having a lot of it. Stupid wonderful show about stupid wonderful people making my stupid face cry.
My last cry (albeit a stifled one) was on Saturday, during a viewing of “Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.” It’s an excellent movie but very, very sad.
I get the urge to cry while watching movies/TV shows ALL THE TIME. But I always stifle it because I’m embarrassed of other people seeing me. I’m thinking I’ll schedule some alone time to watch a sad movie so I can get a nice, unrestrained, cathartic cry.
I cry so much. I have to hold back tears a lot at work because I listen to a lot of podcasts and almost all of them make me cry. I have cried during each episode of Dear Sugar, Strangers, StoryCorps… I’m a big crybaby and I’m ok with it. (Also Susan Orlean has a podcast called Crybabies. Check it out.)
I don’t cry a lot at movies but I am an absolute mess at sad commercials. Oh, and the Hunger Games movies wreck me every time.
(I am weirdly excited to go home and watch some of those youtube playlists?)
My most recent cry was after watching Song Of The Sea–which is AMAZING, everyone see it. I also sobbed like a baby after The Secret Of Kells, so Cartoon Saloon really has my number.
I did too! Why does the magic always go away?
I hardly ever cry. The last time was six months ago when my cat was hit by a car and killed, and I cried for about a week straight. I have pretty severe depression and often feel like a good weep would make me feel better, but it never comes. On bad days I will seek out sad books to try to shake some tears loose but it doesn’t work. I sometimes ponder on the chicken-or-egg question: is this a symptom of the numbness that comes with depression, or was”bottling it up” a contributing factor to developing depression in the first place?
I’m very sorry about your cat. Losing a pet is terrible, but even more so when it’s sudden/unexpected. I was lucky that I got to choose when to say good bye to my dog pal Penny but three years on I have to suppress sobs thinking about it.
Sending healing thoughts your way.
Thank you. It was the worst week of my life – i had to say goodbye to my 14 year old dog on the Wednesday (she was put to sleep very peacefully at home on her bed) and then three days later, on the Saturday morning, I found my cat in the road. 🙁 I adored both of them more than words can say and to lose them both in one week was unbearable and so gut-wrenchingly unfair!
Sorry to hear about your cat, that’s awful.
About the depression thing- I found it hard to cry at actual triggers (sad book/tv) when I was struggling with bad depression last year, but instead I would sometimes cry for no reason/ just feeling sorry for myself. That kind of crying didn’t bring any kind of relief at all- it just made me feel worse (“what kind of state am I in? etc). So yeah don’t force it, and be glad you’re not crying for no reason?
Maybe go out for a walk regularly if you can- I found that exercise & reconnecting with nature really helped (and antidepressants too) get myself back on a more even keel. And now I cry at sad TV. Hope things improve, sending good vibes.
Also if anyone is looking for a book to sob over, the ones that really get me (when I’m not an emotionless robot) are Private Peaceful and Of Mice and Men. I tried to help my sister with her Mice and Men essay at school and ended up a blubbering mess just from discussing the characters.
I cry at all kinds of artworks (fiction, poetry, plays, movies, the occasional Baroque concerto or Mozart mass), but the most mysterious tears are the opera-induced tears. Sometimes it’s because the opera in question is really sad — hello, three-handkerchief ending of La Traviata — but I’m convinced that sometimes it’s something inherent in the music. If I were a neuroscientist, I’d team up with some music theorists and research that hypothesis in a lab with a lot of opera recordings and an MRI machine. (My most recent cry was at a concert at Lincoln Center. Angela Meade sang this aria, which gets me every single time.)
If I ever had to cry on cue, I’d start running through this Edna St. Vincent Millay poem in my head.
(ETA: I blubbed most of the way through the last half hour or so of the final Lord of the Rings film. It’s just one cry moment after another.)
Music is really what gets me, too. I can make it through sad scenes in movies (uh, sometimes) but a sad scene accompanied by a heart-wrenching song? Buckets of tears! Or even just a really soaring piece of music can do it. Luckily it happens more when I’m watching something, as opposed to when I’m performing something, because that would be very inconvenient!
I’m not a big fan of classical music/opera and have never really gotten the whole “moved to tears by a piece of music” thing (I’m too visual/verbal I guess?), with one exception: the line in Porgy and Bess, in “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” that goes “Mornin’ time and evenin’ time and summertime and winter time.” That sequence of notes! i don’t know what it is! I’m crying right now!
I cried at a documentary on women’s rights this weekend, and then again while listening to Amy Winehouse’s first album (“these lyrics are so prescient it’s just so SAD”) and again today while watching Poldark at a key scene <a href=”http://(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02jslnf” target=”_blank”>(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02jslnf – latest BBC period drama set in 18th C Cornwall. Started a bit trite but has now become SO GOOD).
I’m a crying machine, but I have had the flu. So yeah, I recommend….the flu.
Oh and as for films: The Sea Inside (El Mar Adentro with Javier Bardem) is a sobfest, as is the end of Pan’s Labyrinth. Every. Time.
It’s the damn kid’s books that really get to me. When my son was about three, I used to read to him while he was in the bathtub and I completely lost it at the end of Charlotte’s Web, I couldn’t even choke out the words. You know the part. I can hardly think about it even now.
The first time I ever saw my mom cry was when she read me Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I didn’t realize moms could cry before that!
The Judy Garland “A Star Is Born” knocked me out last weekend. Both because of what happened to her in real life and because of the story: the two of them do such a great job playing two people who need each other. (How many times do you get to see a Man in a movie sacrifice himself to stop the woman he loves from sacrificing *her*self for him?)
Also Audra McDonald singing this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fejztr2Ro1Y
Also the last trio in Rosenkavalier and pretty much all of La Rondine and the bit in “The High King” when Fflewddur…well, you know.
I cry a lot about personal stuff, but rarely at books/films/television, however upsetting I find them. However, I saw the film Pride not long ago, started welling up midway through, and then broke down in full-on tears at the end. It was very satisfying.
I was also babysitting once and the children were watching the film Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron. I started crying almost immediately and kept it up throughout the entire film, trying to stay as quiet as possible so they wouldn’t notice.
I’m a crier, for sure. I always angry-cry during arguments, which pisses me right off, because I want to be mad, dammit!
Books affect me less than movies and musicals, anything that has music with it is a million times worse. Oh, and even happy stuff, like those videos of dogs greeting their owners after a long separation, like coming home from deployment, I can’t even watch those!
Actually, anything with dogs will set me right off, I just start thinking about my own dog and there I go!
The video about those kids who get reunited with their pet lion is pretty special…
i cry all the time. when i was a child i distinctly remember enjoying it but lately i’ve come to wish i could stop. it’s so frustrating to start crying when you’re having an argument, though thankfully it’s never happened in front of someone who would ever use it against me. this piece was a really lovely read, thank you for sharing!!
Connie Willis gets me every time: Passage, or Doomsday book, or Blackout. They’re my favorite books, but every time I go back to them, I end up binge-reading until 5am while sobbing.
My go-to for when I want to cry without getting sad is Call the Midwife – I need two hankies minimum. And I don’t even want kids! (I think). There’s just something about all the raw emotion on display and the generally supportive people and the uncertainty about things going right or wrong that makes it the perfect medium through which to get some tears out.
I don’t cry easily. And, like Neuromanticism, it makes me frustrated when I do – I feel sometimes it changes people’s reactions to me when I’m trying to say something.
Sometimes when I get emotional I can’t cry. I get a lump in my throat and it hurts, it really hurts, and sometimes I consciously find my whole body clenched against it.
Weirdly the only thing that really makes me cry are flashmob videos. There’s one on youtube… Oh god. It’s this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k
I think it’s because there’s no reason for doing it – it’s just for the beauty of it. Something about that is really powerful.
I am not really a cryer, but occasionally to make sure I am a human and not robot, here is my list of things pretty much guaranteed to make me cry:
1- Any scene where Rose and 10 think they are saying goodbye for the last time (BOATS OF TEARS)
2- Where The Red Fern Grows (when I have a day to sit around and weep quietly)
3- The scene from The Patriot where Mel Gibson is leaving for war and his mute daughter runs after him and says “I’ll say anything you want, just don’t leave!” (lots of welling up but no real sobbing)
I also remember crying deeply at Deep Impact, but I haven’t seen that movie in probably 10 years minimum. Needs investigating.
Oh and obviously any videos of soldiers coming home and surprising their kid at school/elderly mom/dog. I start crying before he even walks in the door/pops out of birthday cake/friend lets the dog out of the house.
Hey how about that scene in the Stolen Earth where Rose and Ten see each other for the first time and run towards each other and eXCUSE ME, THERE’S AN ONION IN MY EYE, I’LL BE RIGHT BACK.
I was a bit of a crier pre-children, but now… there are so many things that make me cry. Pretty much every movie they watch, for example. Books about children losing their parents. Books about animals dying. Any mention of Sandy Hook. I think most of it’s to do with the fact that now there is something(s) so precious to me that the thought of losing them kills me. Also, I’m often super-tired and a little strung out, so there’s that.
I was a bit of a crier pre-children, but now… there are so many things that make me cry. Pretty much every movie they watch, for example. Books about children losing their parents. Books about animals dying. Any mention of Sandy Hook. I think most of it's to do with the fact that now there is something(s) so precious to me that the thought of losing them kills me. Also, I'm often super-tired and a little strung out, so there's that.
I am convinced that crying / not crying has very little to do with the relative sadness of whatever is going on and everything to do with whatever chemicals are blasting around in my brain atm. I remember age 12, 13, 14 I cried at everything. I was certain that the first two ‘Twilight’ books were masterworks because Bella’s loneliness and insecurity felt so tangible, and her and Edward’s marriage in book 4 was the most cathartic and re-assuring thing in the world. The blank chapter in ‘New Moon,’ when Edward abandons Bella and she goes numb, and all the pages are just blank, not kidding, I sobbed for two hours. But, I mean, I was lonely and insecure and wanted hot mysterious boys to like me anyway. I think I would’ve cried over stick figures if I was told they were lonely and insecure too.
And then in high school I read beautiful, moving books that I couldn’t get out of my head–A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, American Gods, The Road, the poetry of Mark Doty and Andrea Gibson and T.S. Eliot–and, furthermore, experience real death for the first time; my grandmother passing, my cat dying, a classmate committing suicide. I felt those things, physically and emotionally, gut punched or shaken, but I didn’t cry. The cat funeral was the only thing I teared up over, of those things. I was actually mad at myself for not crying at my grandmother’s funeral, because we were close. But it just didn’t happen.
And now, college age, it comes and goes. I’ll cry through a whole Zoe Keating album and the Agents of SHIELD finale and then be dry-eyed watching ‘Atonement.’ I don’t get it. It’s weird.
I suffer from depression, and the medication I take tends to numb me emotionally. For years, whenever I need to remind myself that emotions exist and have a good honest cry, I have been going here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TearJerker/…
It’s a blandly written, exhaustive catalog of all of the saddest moments in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with quotes, arranged in chronological order, and even when I’m at my most numb it’s never failed to elicit ugly crying from me.