The first book that made me cry
Writing Life: 21
Readers don’t easily shed tears—whether laughing or crying—when reading a book. I think it’s easier to make TV, movie, or theatre audiences cry than it is for a writer to make a reader lose control of their emotions. Simply put, Hollywood and Broadway have more arrows in their quiver to achieve the aforementioned tear-shedding. They have everything from brilliant actors, beautiful visuals, sound effects, CGI, and even a dramatic soundtrack to move their audiences. All we writers have are black letters on a white page. That’s it. So books that make me laugh or cry stay with me because the writer and the writing deserve to be remembered.
Speaking of remembering—see what I did there?—I clearly recall the first book that made me cry. I figure I was about seven or eight years old when I tackled what I considered to be my first real book—what I believe are now known as “chapter books,” with few if any pictures. Just page after page of words and the story they told.
Pilot Jack Knight was a book originally published by A.M. Anderson and R.E. Johnson in 1950 as part of the American Adventure Series. I have no idea how I came to be in possession of this old book. I just remember the impact it had on me.
Pilot Jack Knight tells the eponymous aviator’s story in the 1910s and 1920s. Jack, nicknamed “Sky” Knight as a kid for his predilection for climbing trees to dizzying heights, trained to be a pilot with an eye to flying against the Germans in World War I. As it turned out, he was such a good pilot and teacher, that he was denied—or spared, depending on your viewpoint—the opportunity to fly in battle and was instead given orders to remain stateside to train other pilots. He never made it to Europe, and this crushed him for a time.
Eventually, he became famous as the American pilot who made the first overnight transcontinental air mail delivery in his DH-4B plane. Flying an open-cockpit plane largely made of wood and canvas was a dangerous proposition in broad daylight, let alone in the dark of night. Spoiler alert: Jack loses friends along the way in air crashes, including his best friend. That part of the story made me cry. As I recall, the emotion took me by surprise. I hadn’t known that a book—words alone on a page—could engender such palpable and emotional feelings in my gut and my heart. An early epiphany for a young boy about the power of storytelling.
It was the first time a book had made me cry, but certainly not the last time. Over the years, I’ve shed more tears while immersed in novels. If you’ve been reading these weekly missives for a while now, you’ll already know that more than one of John Irving’s novels rendered me an emotional wreck, sometimes on the heels of making me laugh. A Prayer for Owen Meany hit me hard.
Needless to say, having the chance to spend some time with John Irving in the last few months has been a peak experience in my writing life.
Sharing tears with readers
Shamelessly taking a page from John Irving’s writing, you will often find “humour” pushed right up against “pathos” in my own books. So while I hope my novels are funny, they are not bereft (pun intended) of sadness. In fact, over the years, I’ve had the great honour to share tears with readers. It’s happened half a dozen times, in every region of the country. Here’s what I mean.
In my first two novels—and to a lesser extent in my latest, Operation Angus—a principal character, my accidental MP, Angus McLintock, is mourning the loss of his wife of nearly 40 years who has died not long before my first novel, The Best Laid Plans opens. While all three novels are narrated by Daniel Addison, his executive assistant, Angus does close each chapter with a diary entry, which is essentially a brief, grief-stricken letter to his dearly departed wife, Marin Lee. I’ve had some loved ones die unexpectedly, before their time—as have many, if not most, of you—and I think I have some sense of what it’s like to navigate grief—or perhaps “endure” is a better word. I tried to channel my own personal experiences with grief into those chapter-ending diary entries.
To represent the handful of times I’ve shared a good cry with readers, let me relay an encounter I had when on book tour. In March of 2012, I was in Woodstock, New Brunswick, still promoting my second novel, The High Road. (My third novel, Up and Down, was not due out for another six months.) I’d just finished a talk in the public library. An older woman waited until the rest of the audience had left before she approached me. Her eyes were moist and her voice tremulous. I led her to a quiet corner of the room, unsure of what would follow. She proceeded to tell me that she’d lost her husband of fifty years about six months earlier and had been having a very difficult time dealing with her grief. Then she said she’d just read my first two novels and had been feeling much better in the days since.
She went to say that the diary entries of Angus McLintock precisely reflected the feelings she’d been experiencing but had been unable to articulate while in the throes of grief. She said after she finished The High Road just a few weeks before the Woodstock event, she’d started writing letters to her late husband and had kept it up every few days. She was crying by this time and I was holding her hand. She said she thought she’d be all right if she just kept writing those letters that she never stamped and mailed. She then hugged me and thanked me. That’s when I lost it, too.
In case it provides some context, below you’ll find a few excerpts (not complete entries) from the diary of Angus McLintock.
Different versions of my powerful encounter with the reader in New Brunswick, have played out in other parts of the country—I remember another emotional conversation with a bereaved reader in Knowlton, Québec—with both widows and widowers waiting after an event to speak to me privately about their spouses who had recently passed and how the diary entries in my novels had helped them in some way.
I have never had more meaningful interactions with readers than these, and don't expect I ever will. I will always remember how moved I was by these brave people who were living with loss.
I remain honoured that, however unintentionally, I had somehow helped these readers in a difficult time. Books have provided the same comfort and insight for me over the years, so I think of it as (in a way) paying it forward. Those half dozen or so encounters with grieving readers also just made me feel more like a writer. I couldn't wait to get back home to get cracking on the next novel. I still feel that way.
Those emotional exchanges with readers also took me back to my childhood when Pilot Jack Knight, my first “chapter-book,” made me cry. I also recalled how much better I’d felt after some free-spirited snuffling in the fleeting privacy of the bedroom I shared with my twin brother, Tim. (He was somewhere else at the time, though likely not far away!)
Feel free to let me know what books’ prose have brought you to tears (in a good way). Thanks for stopping by and we’ll see you in a week when I’ll be tackling… well, at this moment, I have no idea! It really helps to have you subscribe to this newsletter and to share it with others, if you haven’t already. I’m grateful.
I have to say that I disagree that it is harder to cry reading than watching a movie or play. I think a well written book always gets me on a deeper level. I cry much more often while reading a book. I feel I know the characters better, especially because in a sense, there has been a collaboration between my imagining of the character and the author's words. My mother had the door taken off my bedroom when I was young because she caught me crying and didn't believe for a minute that I was crying over a book!
Terry, a few thoughts on today's post re conveying emotion, especially crying, in our writing.
1) I don't remember the particular books in which I actually cried, though there surely were more than a few. Of course the episodes are almost invariably about death and dying. My earliest memory is of Old Yeller dying. During my testosterone driving adolescent years I don't remember being particularly sentimental, merely lovesick, but after my kids were born I became much more inclined to tears for the vulnerably of people and pets.
2) I do recall the poignancy of Angus's diary notes to his deceased wife. At the time I read those books I imagined his loneliness. A decade later those Angus anguish notes took on a much more relevant meaning.
3) The tears of grief came full on in reading Julian Barnes 'Levels of Life' after my wife of almost fifty years died.
4) One of my earliest attempts at writing (an epistolary, still on my hard drive, still unpublished as too personal, even though fictionalized) was about a doomed love affair. I wanted to bring out the intensity, the innocence, the hopelessness and the loss. Music played a part of the story and while a novel is like a movie running in the mind, it lacks a soundtrack. I had the idea that it would be cool (the book would need to be an ebook) if it would be possible to run a soundtrack in parallel with the text. The technology didn't exist then (and may not even now) and so I was confined to words on pages. Nevertheless I included a list of songs that should be listened to while reading the text, and included prompts in parenthesis that such and such a song should play now. Each selection of course reinforces the feeling of the story at that point. Perhaps one day I will go back to that project.