Lately, and by lately I mean the last three years, I’ve quit reading hard books. What, you may be asking yourself, is a HARD book? No, not a hardcover. No, not a high-intelligence book. A hard book.
- The kind where someone dies.
- Or a child is hurt.
- Or people experience high levels of trauma (like thrillers and horror).
- Or emotions harder than high school heartbreak have to be felt.
- Or the book makes me cry.
The books that make you want to throw the book at the wall because you are so angry or frustrated or sad that you can not turn another page without a good crying jag and maybe a nap.
These used to be my favorite books. When I first read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, my oldest daughter was nine months old and hated to sleep. I was up at 1 am watching her play while I read when I encountered the scene where the little boy, Gage, dies.
I dropped the book and cried on my couch for close to a half hour, hysterical while watching my perfectly healthy and happy baby girl play. I was so distraught over the emotions I felt that I called my boyfriend (who was out at a bar with friends) and made him come home immediately. It took me almost two weeks before I could make myself pick up the book and finish reading it.
It’s now one of my most treasured favorites.
The emotions I felt hurt. They felt intense and real to me in a way I wasn’t equipped to process at that time. But the experience shaped my entire future.
I’ve read thousands of books in my lifetime. Before I had my first child, I could read two or three books a day. I would travel with stacks of books.
That has slowed down but remained a constant in my adult life. Sometimes it was four or five books a week. Sometimes it was one or two. Sometimes it was a book every month. But I was always reading and thinking about stories.
Often, though, the stories I would think about reflected my reality, and it wasn’t good reading material. Trauma, heartbreak, depression, mental illness, violence, hate, jealousy, and greed. All mixed in a weird existence that now seems to be jumbled and confusing.
But still, I persisted in reading the things that made me feel and think. Stories that told of kidnapped children, murder, and eventual happy ever afters. I despised romance novels during this time because they were too marshmallowy. Soft and squishy with no real solid substance. The typical I love you and you love me but we can’t be together forever because I have a stubbed toe kinda storylines that make you wonder how the characters drag themselves out of bed every day because it’s perfect and not real.
And then, life got hard.
I mean, really hard.
And I found myself not finishing my normal crime novel because someone got hurt and I could not handle the emotions.
So, I picked up the dreaded romance novel.
And a whole new world opened up to me. Romance novels are soft and squishy, yes, that much I believe should always be true. But they also can be so well written that you lose yourself entirely in the story. The characters jump into existence and you are part of their love story. And when it’s over, everything works out. It isn’t usually the way you expect, but it works out nonetheless.
Modern romance novels can be light and fun or deep and complex. They can be emotionally exhausting or exhilarating. There are real emotions at play throughout the story.
I love romance novels of all kinds, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want anyone to think otherwise. Well-written romance novels are just as good as the other genres. But when they are poorly written, well, any poorly written book is a tragedy but an unbelievable happily ever after leaves the reader feeling empty.
But here’s the thing. I choose romance novels because they are a sure thing. When I sit down to read a romance novel, I know 100% that a happy ending is coming my way at the back of the book. No matter how intense the roller coaster is, it will be coming safely to a stop in about 300 pages.
I have a guarantee to release those emotions in less than that. So I am willing to make the investment.
The same cannot be said for real life. When things get hard in real life, there is no guarantee that they will get better. And sometimes they don’t.
But that isn’t a reason not to take the journey. If I hadn’t finished Pet Sematary because it was too hard, I would never have picked up another hard book again. Maybe I would have given up reading altogether. This all happened right around 9/11 and I gave up television because it was terrifying to watch. If I had given up both, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
So I guess what I’m trying to say through all this rambling is that life is really hard but that isn’t a good excuse not to live it.
Until Next Time,
Cathy Marie Bown
Cathy Marie Bown 