The 9 Books That Make Us Cry Every Time

9 Books That Make Us Cry Every Time
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Crying: It’s literally good for you, but sometimes a person needs a little help getting the tear ducts going. Sure, you could always just watch The Bridges of Madison County, but there’s something elegant and old-world lovely about being moved to tears by a book. Below, find eight Vogue staffers on the books that make them well up every time, whether in sadness or happiness or just flat-out amazement at a perfectly put-together sentence.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

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A Little Life

The 800-page book can speak for itself, honestly. —Carolina Dalia Gonzalez, executive assistant to the editor in chief

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence

Specifically, the ending of this book never fails to make me cry. Sometimes I’ll just read the last chapters if I want to force myself into that nostalgic, lovelorn state of mind that goes so well with autumn. I won’t spoil the ending, but the rest of the book is also a classic for a reason. Newland Archer, a high-society man in the Gilded Age, is engaged to the innocent and lovely May Welland. When May’s cousin Ellen Olenska returns to New York following a broken marriage in Europe, Newland is torn between the two women. In addition to the, again, absolutely perfect ending, there’s plenty of skewering the customs of the very rich. —Sarah Spellings, fashion news editor

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

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The History of Love

The book that makes me cry is, without fail, Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. Even revisiting a synopsis of the opening brings a prickle to my eye: An old man raps on his radiator to let his neighbors know he’s alive—except he’s not just a lonely old codger, he’s the author of a book chronicling a great love that will make its way across the world and into many lives. There are books you recall more for the sensation of reading them than the plot, and this is one of those books for me. I read it, cried, then turned right around and read it again. Worked every time. —Chloe Schama, senior editor

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

The first—and so far only—book to make me cry was…Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf? Is that very lame? I was a junior in college and going through it, as people in college so often are, and that story’s very final moments (very final lines!) formed a lump in my throat that nearly stopped me breathing. “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”Be still my heart (and my tears). —Marley Marius, features editor

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

I’m not a crier, but Lolita gets me every time—specifically the end of this anguished, ravishing, wonderfully florid, morally tragic novel. Lolita is many things: a provocation; a portrait of helplessness, of venality, of criminality, and, yes, of undeniable, obliterating love. And the tide of love at the end of the book, when Humbert Humbert has lost Lolita but still longs for her and tries to convince her (pregnant, married, 17) to run away with him one more time, is overwhelming. “Lolita...I have to say it. Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.” It is her answer that gives me chills. Four words that are mournful, generous, absolute. “No,” she said. “No, honey, no.” —Taylor Antrim, global network lead and U.S. deputy editor

Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii by Måns Mosesson and I Love to Hate Fashion by Loïc Prigent

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Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii

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I Love to Hate Fashion

As the tragedy and comedy masks that represent theater remind us, there are different kinds of tears. Don’t attempt the heartbreaking read that is Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii by Måns Mosesson without a box of tissues. The pages were wet by the time I closed the book. Weeks later I watered the pages of Loïc Prigent’s wicked collection of quotes collected at fashion shows—I Love to Hate Fashion—which is LOL funny and a reminder of the importance of keeping things in perspective. —Laird Borrelli-Persson, senior archive editor

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking

What I found most remarkable about Didion’s 2005 memoir—which tells the story of the death of her husband and longtime creative collaborator, John Gregory Dunne—was the way that in it, she functioned as both the subject and the observer. As she chronicled that event and its aftermath, when Didion was also caring for her ailing daughter, Quintana Roo, she created a kind of manual for grieving, one that I’ve returned to in moments of loss throughout my life. —Jessie Heyman, executive editor, Vogue.com

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

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The Great Believers

I don’t normally cry over books (or movies or TV shows, unless I’m living through the early weeks of a pandemic, which I’ve learned helps me turn on the waterworks). Yet when I read Makkai’s work of historical fiction about young gay men living through—or, in far too many cases, dying during—the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, I was a sobbing mess. There’s a specific reference to one young man reflecting on the things he’ll miss about being alive, among them “a dog he could walk by the lake,” and the first time I read that sentence, I was overcome and almost nauseous with grief thinking about the many whose lives and futures were taken from them by disease and government inaction. —Emma Specter, culture writer