I'm a crier at the best of times. I tear up a little at holiday commercials. A sad movie will make me cry so much I have a headache for days. And sad books? Forget about it.
When I read Marley and Me, I bawled. Of course, that made my dog worried for me, so she jumped up and snuggled against me, trying to comfort me, which then made things so. much. worse.
I cry through a lot of books, but the one that has done me in the worst is The Book Thief. I stayed up late one night finishing it. I was sobbing so hard that I went downstairs so I wouldn't wake up my husband. Not just crying, understand - full out blubbering, sniffling, gasping, snorting. You know the sound of a five-year-old who skinned her knee learning to ride her bike? She seems calm and collected compared to me.
I now teach this book to one of my grade 12 classes. The first year I did, I swore I couldn't read it in front of them. It wasn't that I was unwilling; I was pretty sure I was unable. But after I came into my classroom to see ten boxes of gift-wrapped tissue, I knew I had to try.
I sobbed. Students sobbed. We traded off to get through the last part of the book, picking up after each other when someone couldn't get more words out. We were in it together.
This fall, it was the same thing. We planned the day we would read the end. We distributed tissues. We closed the door, and we made it through together. I still cried. So did they.
My students told me that the book hurt them. One told me that it "tore her heart out and threw it on the ground and stomped on it." Another student has forbidden everyone to ever mention a particular character's names again. One refused to talk to me for a full day because I made her read this book and apparently it hurt. One of the boys told me I was either really tough or really crazy to want to subject myself to that heartache with each new class of students again and again.
And then they told other teachers and students that they had to read this book. Had to.
So what's my point?
Write the sad stuff.
Write the stuff that makes a class of teenagers sob uncontrollably.
Write the stuff that leaves them with mouths hanging open, or sneaking the book home to read ahead, then whisper to their friends when they come in the next day. "Oh my god, I can't tell you exactly, but you won't believe what happens!"
Write the stuff that hurts the heart.
Write the stuff that makes people go through those ten boxes of tissue.
Write the stuff that bands people to one another in community, in fellowship of feeling. "We're all in this together."
I am trying to remind myself of this. There are some things in my book that, for some reason or another, are hard for me to write about. Usually there is some personal tie, to be honest.
It's hard for me to write about, because these things are so dear to me and leave me so vulnerable, that I am unsure if I will ever be able to do them justice.
I don't want to cheapen those things with words.
But I also don't want to cheat the reader.
Had Markus Zusak skimmed past the section in the book that I still cannot get through aloud, we would be left with a much happier book, or at least one that was not so heartbreaking - but also not near so effective. Zusak had to break our hearts because it was important to the whole point of the book.
Had he skipped those parts, I would not have cried.
I would not have remembered the first experience of that reading for years.
I would not have ordered a class set when I moved to teaching high school, and I would not have shared that experience with students.
He had to make me cry.
It is easier to skip through the sad parts. It is easier to glaze over them, then pick the story up after the fact. It is easier to not have the reader become so emotionally invested in the characters and the story that they slam the book down (or place it gently yet angrily because we should be nice to books), blink, and look around, mouth slightly agape, wondering how everyone else in the world can be sitting so calmly while you are going through such inner turmoil.
It is easier, but it is not better.
My book is nothing like The Book Thief, nor is it anywhere near that upsetting. But I am still working on walking the fine line between expressing the tough parts of my novel and cheapening those emotions. But I will be damned if I jump off that line because I think it is too hard.
I don't want to cheat the reader.
So I guess, when it calls for it, I will write the sad stuff.
What is the saddest book you have read? Do you like sad books, do you refuse to read anything that does not have a happy ending, or do your reading tastes dwell somewhere in between?
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