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Madelon Sprengnether, author of Crying at the Movies, is an accomplished writer of prose and poetry—Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams (personal essays), The Normal Heart (a book of poems)—and an accomplished editor—The House on the Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad.
Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir is an autobiographical account of melancholia and mourning that begins with the drowning of the author's father when she was nine. “Having spent much of my life
trying to evade sadness, I can testify to the futility of such an effort. At the same time I cannot quite bring myself to welcome grief” (p. 176).
Sprengnether tells her story with the clarity and deceptive simplicity of the poet.
I have no memory of my father's drowning when I was nine years old.… Both of my brothers … have memories… of what happened. Only I draw a blank.… I knew I had lost my father, but I somehow missed the experience of his loss [p. 5].
For years afterward, I cried at the movies. When bad things happened to me in real life, I didn't react.… Yet in the dark and relative safety of the movie theater, I would weep over fictional tragedies, over someone else's suffering [p. 6].
My dad was the photographer and filmmaker in our family. It was he who … shot the miscellaneous reels of color film.… The way my mother's face lit up when she turned to face my dad, the way my brothers and I broke up over his jokes—these things were not the product of directorial control. My father filmed what he loved, and what he loved was us [p. 12].
Grief that is not felt or acknowledged does not dissipate; it goes underground, where it flourishes, like some evil plant, in secret and debilitating ways [p. 10].
To a psychoanalyst, Sprengnether's film memoir is a vivid account of the complex problems that may develop after a young child loses a parent, when there is disavowal of grief, fear, and anger in the parent who lives. In telling of her slow process of mourning, the author relies on Klein's descriptio