As a highly sensitive person, Smeyer has long dealt with an abundance of tears—weeping with joy, sadness, remorse, and honestly sometimes for no reason. Nearly three years since it began in the fall of 2016, and five volumes in, Shit I’ve Cried About is still going strong. The beauty of glimpsing the world through Smeyer’s lachrymose eyes and penned drawings is in how she captures the fleeting moments of sadness and anger that punctuate each day. The collected Shit I’ve Cried About will make you laugh, cry, emote with your cats, and tell your friends how much you love them.
“As a member of the Frequent Criers Club myself, I have a laundry list of minute and monumental things I shed tears for. Smeyer perfectly encapsulates how it feels to be deeply sensitive to the little sad jabs and pokes in the world around us and brings them to life in Shit I’ve Cried About. Her sense of poignancy and wit combined creates a perfect tour of her internal world, and we are all lucky to be part of it. With drawings that feel like visual onomatopoeias of sadness and slivers of experiences, Shit I’ve Cried About is something everyone who cries a lot should own. It will make you feel less alone in your Sensitive Crying -and- give you more material to cry about.”
— Iris Gottlieb, author and illustrator of Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression
“I love Shit I’ve Cried About because it’s real. It’s real in a way that’s tricky, because it reads so quickly that it seems casual—but do not be fooled, friends! Smeyer writes directly and intimately about feelings, which is one of the hardest, most generous things to do. By reading about what makes Smeyer cry, I understand more about what makes me cry, and then I laugh, which rules. Shit I’ve Cried About is a work of art, a tender manifesto, and a beautiful, radical politic.”
— Mairead Case, author of See You In the Morning
Sarah Meyer (Smeyer) is a writer, illustrator, and teacher living in Chicago. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s writing program, Smeyer’s essays and writing have been published in the Manifest-Station, VICE Magazine, Full Grown People, and Paper Darts Magazine. Slightly more information is available on www.smeyernet.com.