#97 Brandon Stosuy: The Crying Guy

NICK FIRCHAU:  About seven years ago, Brandon Stosuy was living and working in New York City when he began to notice something strange about many of the people around him.  Seemingly no matter where he went - jogging in Brooklyn, riding the subway in Manhattan, waiting for a plane at JFK, you name it - it seemed like wherever he went, he spotted someone crying. 

Stosuy compares the feeling to when you get your car washed, and for the rest of that day, you begin to notice how filthy everyone else's car is. Once he spotted the first person in tears,  it seemed like they were everywhere.  

Now, this was back in 2016, so certainly pre-COVID, when it felt like everyone was on the brink of tears, especially in New York. But it was still very much in the age of social media, so naturally, Stosuy began sharing what he was seeing on Twitter.  And those first tweets went crazy. Every time Stosuy told his followers he had spotted another person crying in public, the responses poured in. That feedback wasn't judgmental, and to be clear, Stosuy wasn't mocking anyone for shedding tears on the subway or on the street. He was just documenting what he was seeing.  

And complete strangers began responding to him, because they saw themselves in the people crying. 

Now, we're gonna get to how this project evolved for Stosuy and how it connects to parenting kids, because I think that's an important part of this episode, to consider your own relationship to crying.  Think about the last time you cried and the circumstances. And then, if you're a parent, what are you teaching your kids about crying and ideas of emotion?  

But first, I want you to realize that Stosuy is not a famous guy. He's not a psychologist who specializes in sadness and human behavior. He's a former rock writer for Pitchfork. He's a husband and a father of two boys. And he's a diehard Buffalo Bills fan. 

But here's why I was so eager to have him on this episode of Paternal. Back in the spring of 2020, during the worst of COVID, I had a radio DJ on the show to talk about what songs people were requesting as they experienced feelings of isolation and loss. I've always been interested in these people who somehow become conduits for human emotion when things get bad. When people are experiencing some of the most challenging moments of their lives. 

And in a way, that's Brandon Stosuy. For a number of his friends, and now thousands of strangers, he's become the crying guy. 

And it all began with a simple jog in New York City.

Here's Brandon Stosuy, on Paternal.

BRANDON STOSUY: The first time I noticed someone crying, I was jogging. Like I jog a lot. I was jogging and saw someone jogging towards me and they were all, they were crying. So that was when I first noticed it was someone crying. And I thought, well, I've done that too. And it's that kind of idea where I noticed one person, then I noticed someone else, then it just became a thing where I would be in an airport and I'd see someone eating alone like some, some guy eating a corn muffin.

You see, they're crying. There's one where I saw some woman on a subway crying. Then she stopped crying and took a selfie, smiling. Then she stopped and just started crying again. I saw someone crying in an art supply store, but I was like, well, are they crying cause they're a failed artist or like, do they have a project, or is it something unrelated?

Some of the things started becoming really funny. Like I would see someone with a bag that said ‘optimist’ on it and they're crying, and like, that kind of thing. Some guy that had a homemade t-shirt that said, ‘you've got a friend at Verizon.’ This is such a weird situation. I saw a guy eating fruit salad and crying, but again, I'm like, you're just eating fruit salad. It doesn't mean you're crying because of the fruit salad, but when you think about it. Oh yeah, and he also had a mohawk. So it was a guy with a mohawk. 

You see people interacting and crying. I saw these two guys high five. And they were both crying, but you know, who knows, maybe they were crying because they had a victorious moment or a sad moment.

Like, I would never ask the people or approach them, but I would just sort of extrapolate like, well, I wonder what they're crying about? But yeah, that's how I just sort of would see people around, and then I just started marking it down. And as I started tweeting about it, people were reacting so strongly to it.

And then people would hit me up like, ‘Hey, you know, I saw someone crying too!’ Like just yesterday, a friend of mine hit me up and was like, ‘Hey, I saw someone cry on the street today.’ So it became that kind of thing where people are like feeding into it. So then I just kept paying more and more attention.

And then you realize you're in a place like New York, you're so close to so many people. But there are so many people that you tend to be in these situations where you're closer to strangers than you normally would be. And sometimes when you're close to a stranger, you witness them having these moments of triumph or sadness or whatever.

In the end, like it's, you see people in every possible place crying. Then I thought, you know, I want to ask people to share a time they cried, because I was just getting all these really, like, flat vignettes or something, or just a very small bit of someone's life and having no idea what the backstory was. And I couldn't really go and ask those strangers like, ‘Hey, you know, goth kid walking down the street, why are you crying?’ So instead I went back and just asked friends and then started asking strangers too.  

And the prompt was really just ‘tell me a time when you cried.’ You know, most people are pretty apt to admit, ‘Oh yeah, I've cried, or cry.’ Now, then some people cry less than others, but by and large, it's like, it's such a shared thing that I think that's why people weigh in.

NICK FIRCHAU: Tell me a time when you cried. That was the prompt that Brandon Stosuy began sending out to his friends back in 2018 in the hopes that, after a few years of quietly wondering why so many people around him were crying, he could get some answers. The end result is the book Sad Happens, A Celebration of Tears, which was released in November and consists of more than a hundred short essays detailing a time when someone cried. 

Stosuy contributes an essay to the book himself, but he also gathers stories from famous musicians like Phoebe Bridgers and Matt Berninger from The National, comedian Mike Birbiglia, author Gia Tolentino, actress Sasha Gray, and many others. And it is genuinely one of the most interesting books I've read this year, in no small part because of the honesty and vulnerability from the book's contributors. 

Aside from a wealth of musicians, poets, and other creatives who contribute to the book, there are also teachers, librarians, sex workers, therapists, hospice workers, and even Stosuy's own brother, Todd, who works for the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter in California. One of his job responsibilities is to make death notifications when someone's dog or cat is hit by a car. 

“I can't hug these people. It's not allowed,” he writes. “I carry tissues in my pocket and give them as comfort. The last time I cried was when my 18 year-old dog died.  At the time, I wished someone would have offered me a tissue.”

Now, to understand why a book like this might resonate with people, you have to be naturally curious about what makes people tick. But you also have to have an appreciation for the power of tears. And in the case of Brandon Stosuy, that came from his parents. He dedicates the book to his mother, who died of cancer in 2010, but taught her sons from the beginning to the end that it was okay to cry. And he also pays tribute to his father,  who always taught his boys it was okay to show emotion. 

BRANDON STOSUY: My dad, his father was like a really tough Russian guy who worked in a factory and was not one to cry. And so I think my dad, as a reaction, is like a very sweet, thoughtful guy. He kind of kept track of everything I've ever done or everything. Like. He's like, ‘you like that band Dinosaur Jr, right?’ Any little thing I've ever mentioned. 

And I think it's a reaction to his father not being like that. And my mother very much was a very tough person, but in a way where she was so protective of her kids, but also like so much that, ‘you guys should be in touch with your emotions. You should do what you want to do in life.’

And, you know, I grew up in a very working-class family when I was like, yeah, I'm going to be a writer. It's one of those things where it could go over really badly. Like, ‘you want to be a writer?’ But you know, my parents were just always very supportive. 

And I think like I was a kid who in high school, liked The Cure, but also played football. So it's kind of like these kinds of things, like all these weird contrasts. They were just always very into what I was into and allowed me to pursue that stuff. And I was always just drawn to things that, like, I liked reading books that were sad or like to read it, like listening to music, like The Cure’s “Disintegration” is probably my favorite record. I love that. I would like to just kind of be in that, like listening to that kind of stuff and feeling that kind of stuff. 

So yeah, it was, I think where I wasn't frowned upon, um, in my household to cry, not like we would just walk around crying all the time, but if you were upset about something, it was not seen as a terrible thing, you know, it's not like that a shameful thing or something. 

NICK FIRCHAU: You brought up The Cure there, and I'm glad you did. Music is such a huge part of this book. It feels like music is a trigger for a lot of people who contributed to the book. I think it's a trigger for you. I know it is for me. When I think about the times that I've cried recently, most of those times were because a certain song hit me, like in a certain way at the right time.

I put this question out to a few of my male friends in the lead up to this interview because I wanted to hear what they were going to say. And I got a bunch of different answers, but for you, what kinds of music or who are the artists that can usually make you cry?  

BRANDON STOSUY: Yeah, I would say, I mean, for me, it depends on the situation, but running, you know, it's not usually like, traditional workout music. If I'm jogging, Explosions in the Sky will get me, clearly like emotional, triumphant music. But sometimes I'll listen to things where I like the lyrics, I'll listen to The National. And, you know, the drums in those songs are pretty interesting and they definitely are propulsive in an unexpected way But it's more the words that I like. “I Need My Girl.” 

You know, one of these songs where I go, ‘this is a really sad song.’ And then you could just have that moment where you're like jogging past the East River or something and looking at the sun coming up against the Manhattan skyline like, ‘Whoa, I'm suddenly crying!’

Also, Deafheaven. I had this very dramatic moment once while I was listening to Deafheaven while jogging, where there's a song called “Glint” that's like about - at least what I can make of it, it's hard to understand the lyrics to Deafveaven songs to be honest - but what I can gather is like, um, an old person's dying and people are gathering around their bed.

And I was jogging through Brooklyn and uh, some woman kind of flagged me down. And so I took out one of my headphones, but not both. And she's like, ‘can you come in and help me?’ And I was like, sure. It was just like a first-floor apartment. And she took me into this room. And this old woman was on the ground, had fallen off a bed, who was her mother, clearly. And the woman who first asked me to come in was probably in her 60s. So this woman was probably in her 80s.

And she asked me to lift the woman up and put her back into bed.  And I was just like, ‘well, how do I do this kind of thing?’ And then I think because of the adrenaline of running, you're listening to Deafheaven in one headphone. I was like, all right, I'm gonna do this. So I just. got down and did it, put her back in the bed.

And then the woman was like, ‘thank you so much, thank you!’ Then I just put the earphone back in. And I just kept running. Then as I started running, I just started crying. I was like, ‘Jesus, that was like an intense thing that I just kind of did!’  

But there's a lot of music. I mean, like, there's so much music that's sad. There's so much music that's beautiful. And it just, like, takes, like, the right moment. Like, you're sitting somewhere, like, in a Jersey Turnpike rest stop listening to something, and it gets you or whatever. I think we were, like, in a parking garage or something. So it's the most random thing and you're like, ‘why am I crying at this song?’ But it's just like, it hits you at the right time and then it has like some resonance to it, you know?  

NICK FIRCHAU: I want to ask you about The National here in a second, but in thinking about the connection between music and tears or crying, uh, it feels like there are more overtly sad songs that will make you cry. And then there's the kind of music that combines sadness with optimism, and I'll cry way more often if I'm listening to the latter. 

And one of the artists who can get me  pretty regularly actually is the mountain goats, because. John Darnielle has this thing down pat where, especially in the early records, the idea that ‘my life is bad, but I'm going to get out of here.’ And that idea, that combination of sadness, but also some optimism in the end. I don't know why that gets me every time. I've cried a bunch of times listening to that band. 

BRANDON STOSUY: Yeah, my mom was married a few times and a couple of my stepfathers were terrible. So it's like, I think, yeah, Mountain Goats get me too, I think like “Sunset Tree, “ that album, especially.

You know, having grown up in a really small town where my parents got me, they live in different houses, but they understood me. But the second I left that, I'm like, no one here gets what I'm up to or what I want to do, or like, this sucks. I'm like, I don't want to live in this place forever. Like that kind of thing. So I think songs that have that kind of vibe can get me, like “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen, stuff like that, where you're like escaping or you're like going, going somewhere else. 

CLIP FROM “BROOM PEOPLE”

I write down good reasons to freeze to death 
In my spiral ring notebook 
But in the long tresses of your hair,
I am a babbling brook

NICK FIRCHAU: I think there was a point when you realized that this discussion about tears or all this feedback from your tweets about tears could become a collection of essays, this could become a book, but that you needed to ask friends, people you knew to contribute their own essays about crying. You mentioned the National a second ago, they’re a band I think well known for sometimes writing sad songs, introspective songs, their lead singer Matt Berninger was the first person you asked to formally write an essay about, about crying?

BRANDON STOSUY: He's the first one. I've known Matt for like 20-something years. And we met because I booked a show for them in Buffalo when I was living in Buffalo, in 2001. And it was their first show outside of New York City. And I've heard, you know, both Matt and Aaron and Bryce have told people the story, ‘Oh yeah, we were kind of thinking we might break up. We weren’t really sure what the deal was. And we were like, Hey, there's this one guy that likes us that we don't really know in Buffalo. It's like, let's uh, let's go play the show.’ And then I think, you know, they stayed with me because the budget was very small.

When I left Buffalo, I moved to Brooklyn and Matt and I just started hanging out a lot when I moved to New York. And so I asked him, yeah, because, like, “Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers,” and lots of songs about crying and sadness. And he was into the idea. 

Mike Birbiglia is in the book largely through Matt, because they're friends. So there's things like that where he contributed suggestions for some people. So he was the first one.  

NICK FIRCHAU: What would you say were the reactions in general when you're sending out these emails? Like, ‘hey, do you want to contribute to this book?’ Were most people on board to contribute? Or did some people decline and say, ‘no, no, thanks. I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to write anything about this stuff.’

BRANDON STOSUY: Most people said, yes. I think there's a few people that said yes, but they never filed. Nobody outwardly said no. A few people just kind of ghosted on the thing, but I can't think of anyone who said no.

And then I was also trying to think like, I want to keep it as varied and interesting as possible. So I'm like, I don't want all New Yorkers. And we don't want it to feel too samey.  

NICK FIRCHAU: There are obvious themes in here for what makes people cry. And obviously if you think about it in regular life, there are themes, there are triggers for what made people cry. We talked about music, but some of the big ones that come up in the book and in life I think are death, childbirth, breakups, everybody's been through a breakup and cried. But then one that kind of surprised me in the book was how many people admitted to crying on airplanes.

I've cried a few times on airplanes and I couldn't at the time really explain why. Uh, you have a psychotherapist near the end of the book who tries to explain this phenomenon and she writes that quote, ‘the plane's norms force us to be quiet and contemplative. Disconnecting from the buzz of the external and reconnecting to our internal world. Reconnection invokes mindfulness, which at times may accompany crying. If we haven't had time in our busy daily lives to hold space for grief, transition, fear, or sadness, we are particularly vulnerable to the stillness of the airplane.’ 

That makes a lot of sense to me. What did you think of the connection between crying in planes? It feels like everyone's done that.

BRANDON STOSUY: I've had bad luck on airplanes. I'm like, ‘you know, I'll just watch this Mr. Rogers documentary. Why not?’ And then I'm like, ‘Oh God, why am I watching this?’ You know?. Like, you know, Hanif Abdurraqib writes about that too, where he's like, you're far above the people you love who are living, and you're somewhere below the people you love who have passed. And you're  stuck in the middle. 

It's like, you know, a super poetic thing to say, but I was like, man, that makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think he’s a psychologist, but yeah. He's an amazing writer. And when he sent me that, I was like, ‘holy shit. I think Hanif has cracked the code here.’ This is like what it is for me. 

But I know there's other things where you're between places. People say the adrenaline of being in the air, like all these other reasons people have. But I liked Hanif's idea of just being like between these two spaces, you know?

I think also there's the part of like, if you think too hard about flying -  I had to fly to my brother's wedding last week in Palm Springs and I think my brother and I are really good friends, and because we grew up in such a small town, we really just had each other for long periods of time. But every time I leave him, there's this transition moment where I'm like, ‘I'm going to break down and cry.’ So I'm not going to see him again for a while. He lives in Santa Cruz. I live in New York. So I think that is a thing too with planes. Cause you're like, in some cases you're leaving someone like that. So like I'm getting on a plane, I'm on this plane to get to leave my brother, then like we're texting little jokes back and forth.

So I think there's that part of it too, you know, where you're often leaving or you see people in the airport all the time, you know, hugging and crying. It's a strange space to be in.  

NICK FIRCHAU: Were there any other themes you noticed or triggers for people that surprised you? 

BRANDON STOSUY: One that I found really, like, not surprising, but really moving was, there's a piece where a friend of mine who was a writer, she writes about how she and her mother, her mother ended up having dementia and they had never really like made up on certain things. And now her mother's still alive, but just has no memory of anything, and just having this person still alive and I'm not being able to reconcile. That one really struck me as super, incredibly sad because it's not a death, but it's kind of a death. 

I mean, a couple of women wrote about motherhood. Like Gia Tolentino wrote about how she never really cried until she was pregnant. T. Cole Rachel, who's a poet, his is great because he's going to see his father who has cancer. And he flies home to Oklahoma and it's really sad in this kind of moment of being depressed. And he’s like ‘I'm just gonna treat myself in the airport’ and he buys it like a Cinnabon. And then like when he gets off the plane, he realized he has all the cinnamon sugar on his face. Like he looks in the mirror and JFK and he's like, ‘Oh God, I've had this on my face the whole time!’ 

Things like that struck me, where there's this complete sadness, and this moment of levity. That's not going to solve anything. And he's not suddenly like, ‘Oh, now my dad's cancer free. This is great!’ But it's like a moment to laugh or to find something temporary, like respite in the middle of this. Otherwise, I think that those strike me. And honestly, the zookeeper really got me.

NICK FIRCHAU: Yeah! That one struck me too. And you mentioned that, you know, you sought out people whose jobs might bring them in touch with sad emotions or crying.  And I never thought about it, but of course zookeeper would be on that list. Of 

BRANDON STOSUY: Yeah, the zookeeper was amazing because Olivia, who wrote that, gets to you because you take care of these animals and you're like, ‘Oh my favorite owl has died!’ There's certain animals that don't have the longest lifespans, but you're taking care of them every day and then suddenly they're gone. 

I remember when I was a kid and I grew up in Southern New Jersey in the Pine Barrens, and the closest zoo to us was a Philadelphia Zoo. And I remember at one point the monkey house burned down and all these monkeys died. I remember the zookeepers were devastated. You'd see it on the news and people were crying. And so I thought I knew that as a kid, but I somehow didn't really think about it.

Like after that, it hadn't come to mind. And I was thinking like, what are some people that could be in this book? I was thinking of the obvious stuff. Mortuary and therapists and teachers! That's one that got me too, there's a teacher who deals with a kid who's being bullied and sees himself in the kid who's being bullied, that kind of stuff.

There's one my friend Eric wrote where he's uh, he's at Taco Bell and like the guy working the Taco Bell is crying. So, you know, people cry at every job. I think there's bound to be something that gets you. And you're like, damn it, here I am at work crying, you know, I'm crying in a meeting or something. So yeah, it's just, it just keeps going. 

NICK FIRCHAU: I want to end with a series of questions about you and your relationship to crying. And you know, you, you send out all these emails and you get essays back from your friends for contributions to the book, but  what's your relationship to crying with your friends? And how have you noticed, if at all, that that relationship has changed over the years as you've gotten older?

BRANDON STOSUY: It depends on the friend. But I think people I've known for a longer time, yeah, there's moments where things are tough and people are not afraid to get emotional. Even if they don't cry, necessarily, they can still share their emotions with you and be honest with you about what's going wrong or what's going right.

The thing that my wife and I have noticed, we know more people recently that are divorced. So then you're dealing with people who are having a breakup. So when you start sharing those things, things can get more real. Like, I had lunch with a friend not too long ago, I hadn't seen in a while, and like, we're just talking, and he's like, ‘So you should know, you know, so-and-so and I, we broke up.’ And that just hit me. So there are those, you have those things.

I think when you're younger, if someone says the word ‘cancer’ or something, you're just like, ‘yeah, whatever.’ But as you get older, you're like, ‘whoa.’ So things start taking on more resonance. As a kid, you're like ‘nothing's gonna happen, I'm invincible. I'm going to be there forever.’ So I do think as you get older, I think there's a reason why I see older men, like, you know, in their seventies or something, they just seem to cry more. Like, more vulnerability than when maybe that same person was like a teenager or something. So like things take on more weight. I think it's like friendships as you get older. Maybe have more of that heaviness to them, too. 

NICK FIRCHAU: You and your wife have two sons. Did you have any anxieties about how to teach these boys, ultimately, I guess, what your parents taught you about vulnerability, especially knowing that emotion and crying can often be discouraged by a lot of people, especially among men?  

BRANDON STOSUY: I mean, we talked to them about, ‘did you have a good day or, you know, what went wrong?’ And I think both the kids are like, if something went wrong, they don't hide it very well. Talking about these kinds of things honestly and openly about it. 

What's interesting is like, Jake, the younger one, he's a goalie, a hockey goalie, and that's like a sport that's super intense and he's going to these tournaments and saving 50 shots and like really into hockey, really into sports.

Then he and his friends will hang out, and they're like, ‘Oh, look at these pictures. These little kittens are so cute!’ So they're still kids and they're going back and forth, but they're also so kind to each other. So I think it's just like a different time, where they're just, they're more apt to be okay with these kinds of things. Like the other day,  Jake's best friend came over and it was, he plays soccer too. And, uh, before soccer, I was like, ‘what are you guys doing?’ And they were crafting together. But they were using pieces of paper that they were cutting out into the shape of soccer jerseys. Then they were copying the logos of their favorite professional soccer teams. 

So, yeah, I don't know. I think we just approach it by providing them, if they're into hockey, all right, we'll drive you all over the place. You know, we'll go to hockey and then they're not afraid to tell us, you know, their fears or their hopes or what they want to do.

We just always have been open about it, like open to them. But I mean, I also asked my two kids to write something, like, ‘Hey, do you guys want to be in my book? And if you do, just write something about being sad. Like, when did you cry?’ 

And their reactions were both so different. The one writes about seeing the Bills lose. And then the other one writes about the last day of school, when he realized COVID was shutting the schools down. I was like, these are like very different things, but both valid. Jake is not ashamed to say, ‘Hey, I cried because the Bills lost to the Chiefs, you know, and then I woke up still crying.’ He's like, ‘I did, you know. I'm not scared of this. I'll tell people this’

And Henry's like, ‘yeah, I cried when a school shut down because some of those kids are going to different schools. I might not see them again.’ So I think that kind of normalizing sadness is healthy. They're not  lingering in it,Jake's not walking around in a Bills jersey crying every day. It was a one-day thing. And same with Henry. Now he’s in middle school. He has some friends from the old school, a bunch of new friends. They're perfectly adjusted children, but we’re also in touch with, hey, you know, we cry.

NICK FIRCHAU: So ever since I started this show a few years ago, I started getting all these emails and notes about  stuff like father-son stuff, articles, stories, whatever it might be about father-son relationships. To a number of people for better or worse, whether I wanted to or not, I've become like, the dad guy. So the last question for you is, to your friends, and I guess to a lot of strangers, have you become the crying guy? And are you cool with that?  

BRANDON STOSUY: Yeah, the other day there was some meme that went around where it was like some phone number that was like 1-900-cry or something, 1-900-tears. And I went into Instagram one day and I was like, huh, I have a lot of messages on Instagram, what's going on? And I opened it up and everyone had sent me this thing. I was like, damn.

Someone will see a license plate that says like, ‘tears’ or something and someone will text it to me, or like a billboard that has something about crying in it or this or that. I think you being known as the dad guy, it's interesting when people think of you in some specific way. And I prefer that than they're like, ‘Oh, this is the guy that knows a lot about The Strokes’ or something. 

You know what? I'll take it. I'll be the crying guy. 

NICK FIRCHAU: That's husband, father, writer, and editor, Brandon Stosuy.  Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears is available now wherever you buy books.  If you'd like to learn more about Stosuy's work, we'll put a link in the notes for this episode where you can find more information.  Paternal is edited and produced by me, Nick Firchau.  You can email me at nick@paternalpodcast.com or I'm on Twitter at Nick Firchau. The Paternal logo was designed by Trevor Port.  

I'm Nick Firchau, and this is Paternal.