Book Review: 'The Places I Have Cried in Public' by Holly Bourne

By Jane Shussa

The Places I Have Cried in Public is a well-written book that is both triggering and healing. It is about love, but it is not a love story.

The book starts at a bench - where the author, Holly Bourne, asks: can you see the girl crying? “She is not always easy to spot. She may have her head down, pretending to be on her phone, using her hair to cover her blotchy face. Or she may be leaning against the bus window, turning into the glass so you can't see her tear.”

The above might sound familiar if you have cried or seen someone cry in public. Usually, it is a girl or a woman because “men are too strong to cry,” let alone in public.

This book follows Amelie, an introverted girl who moved from a big city to a small town to start a new life she did not ask for. While in this small town where everyone knows everyone, Amelie, an extreme introvert, meets new friends, Hannah and Jack, who attend the same college and are in the same music class.

Amelie is a shy, talented singer and songwriter who gets stage fright every time she is set to perform. No matter how good everybody tells her she is, she freaks out before performing. Being away from her then-boyfriend made it even harder for her because now she didn't have anyone to calm her nerves.

Amelie forgets how sad she has been after moving to a new town when she found the rarest love, or so she thought. Amelie met Reese. He is also a singer and a songwriter in a band with his childhood friends.

He is a guy that every girl in college dreams to be with. Charming at first. Big smile. He adores you. He makes you feel like the happiest and the luckiest girl because you are with him. He makes you question all the other “love” you might have experienced before him.

“There’s nothing more exciting than seeing your best self through the lens of someone’s adoring eyes.”

But something goes wrong—so wrong that Amelie finds herself with no friends, paranoid, pathetic, and lost. She can't recognise herself. It is when Amelie creates a memory map of all the places she cried in public and why she cried. This memory map helps her trace precisely where things went wrong so that she can find herself again.

The author beautifully raises the question of love. What is love? How do you know that someone truly loves you? Amelie’s memory mapping explores different strategies that emotional manipulators use to win over their prey.

Love bombing and matching their prey is their obvious strategy. The author highlights the importance of therapy for gaining clarity and healing, which Amelie seeks from her memory mapping while speaking to a therapist.

The book brings in issues usually shied away from, like how people are addicted to the people they claim to love. This addiction stems from being treated inconsistently. With these people, the lows and highs are high.

It was healing and triggering because as I read this book, it felt like something that many of us have experienced at some point in our lives or are experiencing now, but we lack better ways of describing it.

The author uses flashbacks, for example, when Amelie traces what went wrong. It was a conversation between Reese and Amelie. Amelie moved about mapping as she conversed with Reese, which was quite clever.

Hannah was such an important character for me because she brought in the one relationship many of us take for granted—friendship.

Hanna’s friendship with Amelie was crucial because she showed that we need friends who will be honest with us and hold us accountable. We need friends who care enough about us to ask if we are okay, even on bad terms. That is what friendship is all about.

This book explores what love isn't. It reminds us that revisiting and speaking about our bad experiences can help us heal and validate our feelings and experiences.

This quote sums up the book nicely and serves as a reminder of what life is all about—from the places we go to the people we meet. Bourne puts it exquisitely: “We leave behind echoes of our lives everywhere we go, trapping them into the fabric of the world around us.”

I recommend this book to anyone feeling lost and wanting to find themselves. It is a book for people who wish to understand emotional manipulation, for people who hate themselves because they do not know who they are or how to rediscover themselves.

Jane Shussa is passionate about books, coffee, nature, and travel. She serves as a Senior Digital Communications Officer for Twaweza East Africa.