Cirrus@Austlit

'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)