Reviews for Why Am I Crying?

The average rating for Why Am I Crying? based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-27 00:00:00 George Heib I have mixed feelings about this book. It wasn't a great masterpiece, but I did get some good things from it. It's about how this woman heals from a terrible, chronic spinal cord infection that is extremely painful and makes it almost impossible to move around. I read it because I wanted to see how a memoirist writes about healing, how that topic can be made compelling and I think I learned a lot about that. She handles the healing memoir thing competently and her story is interesting. But it dragged for me, in various places and I often found it overly sentimental. But she does a good job at showing how healing happens -- which is a hard thing to do. I also think there's some good wisdom in this book. A lot of the book focused on how the narrator returns to her Catholic roots through connecting with some unconventional Catholic healers she meets and from studying about ancient Catholic mystics. She approaches Catholicism in a skeptical way that would appeal to people unfriendly or suspicious of Catholicism, and the way she writes about spirituality is very open, not dogmatic, very reasonable. But at the same time, because of my ... oppositional relationship to Catholicism, all the Catholic stuff got on my nerves a bit. Still, I learned a lot from this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-11 00:00:00 Christine Jones This was a slow read for me because it wasn't very engaging. I kept reading because I was interested in the theme of faith and healing, especially a reexamination of faith. The author finds new meaning in faith from mysticism. She touches on her health problems, her life path, the religious community in New Mexico, and the history of Christian mystics, but her writing reads more like a diary, it just wasn't that interesting to me as a reader. It kind of answered my main question going in: why and how do we often return to faith when we need it most? But she accepts some pretty ridiculous concepts like levitation and the stigmata. I was hoping for a more realistic examination that made more sense, scientifically and sociologically. I've been looking for the best words to describe the kind of person she seems to be in the book. At her best she comes off observant and kind and harmless and spiritual, but sometimes it's forced and kooky.