Would you go to a Crying Room?

This new novel features a woman who works in a converted office space in Kings Cross where people go to cry.

I may feel as though The Crying Room was written for me, but I suspect I will not be the only reader who has that thrilling feeling, writes Stephen Romei.

We all have books we love, books we like and books we can take or leave. Then there’s that rarer book that feels as though it was written for you. Gretchen Shirm’s new novel, The Crying Room, ticks that box for this reader.

I like to find connections between authors, guided by the feeling that all writers speak to each other. Whether they know each other’s work or not, on the page they share ideas, beliefs, themes and thoughts on how to tell a story.

The writer who first came to mind as I read The Crying Room was Raymond Carver and in particular his great 1983 short story A Small, Good Thing.

Big bad things happen in Shirm’s book – the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 becomes central – and so do small good things.

As I read on, I thought of George Saunders and the believable zaniness of his stories. Early on Shirm’s main character, Susie, shaves off her hair and sells it to a wig maker.

Three days later she returns to buy the wig made from her own hair, “which she wore every day over her new short hair’’.

When I say main character I do so knowing that designation is debatable. This book has a metafictional seam. This line, from a chapter titled The Writing Class, is worth keeping in mind: “Every writer has a subject and, if they’re lucky, they find a way to address the subject differently over the course of their writing life.”

Sydney-based Shirm is a writer and lawyer. The Crying Room is her second novel, following Where The Light Falls (2017). Her well-received first book was the short fiction collection Having Cried Wolf (2010).

So it’s perhaps no coincidence that I see connections with Carver and Saunders, American masters of the short story. Shirm’s novel is a connected series of stories, each with their own title.

Each one is so perfectly formed that it could be read on its own. Together they are a powerful exploration of the strengths and frailties of the human condition. They plumb the complexities of love: between parent and child, siblings, husband and wife.

This is Bernie, Susie’s “blunt like steel” mother, thinking, at the age of 70, about love. “How she had underestimated its scale, its magnitude. Love was immense, she had realised; large enough to contain even anger.”

Later, Bernie, who lives with her husband David in Ballina in northern NSW, reveals a terrible secret that may explain why she underestimated – or perhaps forgot – love.

That chapter, After The Fact, in which an armed man holds up a Ballina bank – but not for the usual reason – is superb. Bernie is in the bank and, not knowing if she will survive, decides to break her silence.

Susie’s older sister, Allison, is a central character, as is her teen-then-adult daughter Monica. So is Susie’s boyfriend-then-husband Will.

The Crying Room by Gretchen Shirm

In the titular opening story, Susie, a medical student, works part-time in an office space in Sydney’s King’s Cross where people come to cry.

This absorbing story, with its Saunder-esque move into emerging reality – there are crying rooms in Spain, for example – sets up what is to follow in chapters such as Laugh Track, Hiroshima Blooms, The Plane Fell out of the Sky and The Closure Company.

Shirm’s use of language is brilliantly inventive. Here’s someone in the waiting room at The Closure Company, which helps people deal with loss. “When her name was called, she steered herself cautiously down the hall like a vessel full of water.”

Here is Susie finishing up her shift at the crying room. “Through the windows, the sheer afternoon light caught on the wet faces of the patrons. They reminded Susie of miners in a cave, with a small circle of light above them to illuminate their features. She thought of the clink, clink, clink of sharp metal implements chipping away patiently at cold, dark stone.’’

Here is Allison, who we are told is cruel, cooking breakfast for her family. “Once I was someone, she sometimes thought as she cut, stirred and poured. But even that didn’t capture it. The sadness had more to do with what she might have been and how those possibilities had shut in front of her, like politely closed doors.”

“Politely” is such a well placed word, as is “cautiously” for the Closure Company customer and “underestimated” in Bernie’s reflections on love. Shirm’s careful choice of words make her sentences ones to read and re-read.

This is a bold work of Australian fiction. I may feel as though it was written for me, but I suspect I will not be the only reader who has that thrilling feeling.

Stephen Romei is a writer and cultural critic

The Crying Room

By Gretchen Shirm
Transit Lounge
250pp, $32.99