Crying at the Movies,

We took Crying at the Movies to bed with us like a bad cold, prepared to wallow in it and nurse it, not realizing it was a page-turner. This memoir by Madelon Sprengnether, University of Minnesota English Professor and creative writing instructor, is a story of self-discovery told through the very adult–and very childlike–process of seeing a film story and relating it to personal history. The book winds its way through eight films and more than five decades in the writer’s life, in a rich form that intrigues as much for its clear presentation of the various film stories as it does for the private and powerful tale of Sprengnether’s life. It’s not necessary to have seen the movies or to understand much about psychoanalysis to gather the lifelong struggle of a woman who’s father drowned when she was just nine, and who lives for years in a home where this traumatic event is neither discussed nor felt. Blending screen stories, film images, literary quotes, and a mystical chronology, the memoir flows from the shadows and images of home movies, through the recollection of suppressed emotions and memories, to the reality of Sprengnether’s mother’s death, funeral, and burial told in concrete detail. After reading this dense volume published by Graywolf Press, the impulse will not be to lie in bed, but to gaze into the shadows and snapshots, the rented movies and real-life memories, and realize, as Joy does in the 1993 film Shadowlands, “Pain then is part of the happiness now. That’s the deal.”