Saturday, February 21, 2015

ugh, god

I stayed up til 3.30 and finished The Time Traveller's Wife. I read and wept, clutching my chest against the pain and gasping for breath, for two hours and a half hours.

This is why I intuitively did not read it before. Books like this are not for me. Maybe they're for others, but I cannot read about love and grief, especially when it's written so rawly.

Soon after my mother died, a friend gave me an Anne Patchett book about bereavement. It was so very painful to read. I still don't really understand why she gave it to me - except, as I read last night, unable to go to sleep until there had at least been an ending, if not a happy one, I considered that maybe not everyone feels the way I do when they're reading. Maybe others can separate fiction from reality more, or dissociate their own emotions from the story and the characters. I think it is a flaw in me, especially during hormone affected times, that I am unable to stop my emotions from flooding me in response to stories.

How do you all do it, enjoy the experience nevertheless? I had a feeling that book would be too much for me, and I was right. I shouldn't have read it, good as it is. I pretty much wish I hadn't read that Anne Patchett book, with its detailings of grief, loss and abuse. I wish I'd never read that graphic and tragic description of foot binding in a book about a Chinese woman. I wish I hadn't read this, with its intense picture of love, loss and loneliness. I wish I hadn't read it as I was getting my period.

I just read this, about being a 'lost soul' and I fear it's me. It might also be about being depressive, which isn't a great way to frame it, but one that resonates nonetheless. Off I go, to run errands, pick up my pills that are doing god knows what to me, but will take the edge off this misery storm I'm in. 

4 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

I never did read that Time Traveler's Wife book. I started it and something about it- well, I just couldn't. Now I know maybe why.

Jo said...

It definitely has a current of intensity and impending ... something running through it from the start.

Fien said...

I can't do it either, and I don't get how other people can. I can't even watch birth things on TV. Like happy ones that end well.

Jo said...

Nice to see you, Fien.

I couldn't deal with ambulances or weddings after my mother died. And the birth thing... that's enormous.