'The Crying Room movingly explores family boundaries and stories, finding original ways to express the contradictory experience of belonging to a family, and being an individual at the same time.
'When Bernie Rodgers and her husband move to the coastal town of Ballina, she finds that there is more than a physical distance separating her from her adult daughters. Bernie loves her daughters, but the problem she realises is with the way she loved them.
'Bernie's daughter Susie is professionally successful, but her feelings remain distant, even to herself. When she takes on the responsibility for caring for her niece, the pieces of her life finally snap into place. The inexplicable disappearance of an aeroplane though, plunges her life into mystery once again.
'Morally acute and dazzlingly accomplished, this is an affecting novel about loneliness, love, family and the need to feel.' (Publication summary)
'Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room and Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here share a preoccupation with death and grief and what it means to live on, without intimate others, during a climate crisis. Both novels feature protagonists who lose parents and partners, and both explore their themes via writer-narrators who are producing fictions.' (Introduction)
'As a child, I sometimes went to a church where there was a crying room for children; the glass panes were strong enough to muffle the audience’s crying sounds. It would reflect them back tenfold at the crier, but would rarely silence them. The same stifled anguish is evoked in Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room, a collection of interwoven stories that mix speculative and realist fiction. The prevailing structure is resemblant of a mood board, a pastiche of scenes with a distinct atmosphere, as the main characters inhabit a cavernous, melancholic state compounded by the inward pressure of compressing their feelings into a performance of normality.' (Introduction)
'Often unsettling and sensitive novel follows a thread of emotional repression through three generations of women'
'This is a bold idea, and the author, an Australian writer and lawyer, executes it brilliantly, says Stephen Romei'
'This is a bold idea, and the author, an Australian writer and lawyer, executes it brilliantly, says Stephen Romei'
'Often unsettling and sensitive novel follows a thread of emotional repression through three generations of women'
'As a child, I sometimes went to a church where there was a crying room for children; the glass panes were strong enough to muffle the audience’s crying sounds. It would reflect them back tenfold at the crier, but would rarely silence them. The same stifled anguish is evoked in Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room, a collection of interwoven stories that mix speculative and realist fiction. The prevailing structure is resemblant of a mood board, a pastiche of scenes with a distinct atmosphere, as the main characters inhabit a cavernous, melancholic state compounded by the inward pressure of compressing their feelings into a performance of normality.' (Introduction)
'Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room and Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here share a preoccupation with death and grief and what it means to live on, without intimate others, during a climate crisis. Both novels feature protagonists who lose parents and partners, and both explore their themes via writer-narrators who are producing fictions.' (Introduction)
