men cry in cars: the internal landscape of men unread (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798187872015)

There are things a man will tell a stranger before he tells the person sleeping beside him.

Ask him what is wrong and he will say he is tired. Tired is the great male confession. It can mean frightened, ashamed, lonely, grieving, or close to collapse. It can mean: I do not know how to tell you what is happening inside me without becoming someone I was taught to despise.

men cry in cars enters the private life beneath the male performance: the place where fear becomes anger, grief becomes silence, tenderness becomes a joke, and the need to be held becomes a lifelong determination never to need anyone. Through essays, poems, eulogies, letters, and the anonymous voices of ordinary men, it maps what men feel, what they are permitted to show, and what happens to everything they bury.

It is not a defence of masculinity, and not an attack on it. It implicates its own narrator, a man who blamed the people who loved him for not understanding him while making certain they never could, and follows him from armour to exposure, and to a harder, truer idea of strength.

A man does not become less himself when he tells the truth about his fear. He becomes less divided.

Begun in a car and a hostel, and written for the men who have not yet said the true word, and for the people who love them and keep asking anyway.