Every family has strengths and every family also has weaknesses. What is spoken, enacted and demonstrated can be just as powerful as what is left unsaid, to be figured out or reconciled later. Within the family the parent often has a profound responsibility – to provide comfort and care, to teach us a good way to be in the world – but should we expect them to teach us everything?
Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room is a novel that encompasses three generations of a family. Deftly jumping across time and place, Shirm switches between Bernie, her two daughters, Allison and Susie, and her granddaughter, Monica. There’s a well-struck balance between these four characters, despite this novel being on the shortish side. While the women interact with each other and relate closely, they each also face their own unique challenges, with self-worth, love and relationships, old age and tragedy. They’re like a set of related prisms, all reflecting their own unique experiences back on to the central mirror of the family. The crack in this mirror is the need for emotional intimacy – a facet missing from Bernie’s life and the lives of her children and grandchild.
I was intrigued by the title of this book: a crying room is a place in Shirm’s novel where expressing emotion is sanctioned – the time and space are literally paid for. Susie works there; it’s one step on her own journey through grief. This is an almost cheekily futuristic (or is it dystopian?) element of the novel but, for the most part, it is a character study of four unique individuals.
Shirm’s writing is concise and at times very beautiful, qualities that help the reader move across these varied interior landscapes and feel empathy for each. The novel captures the magical fluidity and interrelation of time that exists between three generations and it’s in these understated moments that the novel offers us some real insights on the ways family work or don’t.
In this sense The Crying Room is a kind of family history; one that is less interested in genealogies and key dates and more in the ways different people move through and past traumatic events. Often, these are traumas that happen to someone else, that are suppressed and unspoken. The silencing can be so effective that others might not even know of their existence, despite feeling their effects.
‘Mum.’ Susie reached a hand to her mother’s shoulder, and Bernie examined it, strangely. ‘Is that why you were always so sad when we were little?’ ‘Sad? What are you talking about, Susie?’ Bernie suddenly looked angry.
This moment is so subtly written by Shirm that you could almost miss its deep significance. But I think that’s also the point of the novel: it’s not about what happened, but the ways we deal with it. It’s not about one specific time, but the many moments that follow after.
Towards the end of The Crying Room, Bernie relates to a friend who works in childcare how difficult it must be “listening to kids cry”. The friend responds:
‘You have to let them cry so they know what they feel.’ Bernie tensed when she heard this. She thought of when her girls were young and how she couldn’t bear the sound of their whinging, how it set her, physically, on edge.
Letting children express emotion, as a path to self-knowledge, is a foreign concept to Bernie. It’s something she doesn’t – or can’t – teach her own children. But Shirm shows us how Bernie’s children discover and feel, and how they nurture each other, sometimes in unconventional ways.
This is a novel about when something essential is missing. I often found The Crying Room to be an unsettling reading experience. But Shirm does give us characters that can learn and change and images of transformation. An apple tree, planted as a seedling by Susie, eventually grows into a bountiful bearer of fruit in Bernie’s house. It is a beautifully redemptive image. This is a deeply probing and sensitive examination of family and how ways of feeling are passed between mothers and daughters.
The Crying Room by Gretchen Shirm is published by Transit Lounge ($32.99)
