According to Bob, the first book that made me completely lose it was Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which I read shortly after my divorce, taking every plot point personally, weeping over Isabel Archer’s torments and tragedy. Rather than focus on the beauty of James’s prose, I let myself get entirely caught up and then fall apart over the plot, continuing to cry even after I’d closed the book and put it away. But Portrait of a Lady is no exception. Novel after novel, things get soggy.
Perhaps this sentimentality could be fought off. “I will not cry over The Fault in Our Stars,” I told myself before picking up John Green’s tearjerker YA novel about two cancer patients, knowing exactly what I was in for. “It’s too much of a cliché.” Surely I could rise above the adolescent drama because I was approaching it from a professional angle as children’s books editor. I would not be manipulated.
I cried like a brokenhearted fifteen-year-old.
In 2013, on the way back from visiting my cousin Kirsten, now living in London with her husband, I cried while reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Alone on the plane to New York, my bathos took up several seats, covered with damp tissues. Two passengers and a flight attendant came over to ask if I was okay.
The following year, I took Beatrice and my mother along on my next trip to London. Beatrice was eight at the time, and had read enough about England to make a visit abroad meaningful, her very first bout of literary tourism. We had many lit-tour plans: the Harry Potter walking tour, the Harry Potter studio, the British Museum, the bookstores. Marchpane, a tiny store dedicated to used and rare children’s books, many of them out of print. Daunt, a pair of stores that organize books according to geography, allowing browsers to tour a world of literature within its walls. Beatrice and I annoyed my mom by antisocially reading on the Tube exactly the way we read on the subway back home. We’d stake out seats as soon as we boarded and whip out our books, eschewing conversation.
One afternoon, after my mother ditched us for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Beatrice and I were on the Tube en route to meet friends at the Globe Theater. I was reading Never Mind, the first volume of the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St. Aubyn’s autobiographical novels tracing his trajectory through boyhood, heroin addiction, and recovery. I’d wanted to read St. Aubyn’s books after so many authors I admired had gushed about them in the Book Review’s “By the Book” column. “Have you read the Patrick Melrose books?” was the question everyone was asking that publishing season, and I was tired of saying, “Not yet.”
Meanwhile, Beatrice was on an Enid Blyton tear. She’d read the few volumes of Blyton that had made their way stateside, English editions stickered over with American prices, but the supply had dried up. Blyton, who died in 1968, was wildly popular in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth for much of the twentieth century, but had taken a critical battering in later enlightened years on charges of sexism, racism, elitism, poor writing, and an absence of imagination. Some of the most egregious material has been sloughed off recent editions, which bear remarketed illustrations even as the content—boarding school shenanigans, old-fashioned capers, and fantasies—remains largely the same.
Our very first day in London, we went directly to my favorite bookstore in the city. If we hadn’t, I’d just be counting the minutes until I did. Beatrice understood completely. Hatchards, founded in 1797, is the oldest bookshop in London, just off Piccadilly Circus. It’s the official bookstore to the royal family; it actually feels like a bit of a privilege to shop there. A wooden staircase, buffed by age, winds up multiple floors, past displays featuring an idiosyncratic selection of literary fiction and stubbornly British subjects of concern. There is no café.
Beatrice, her undereyes mauve with fatigue, was nonetheless stirred awake by the store’s bounty of Blyton. She pored over her options, plucking titles from the shelves into hopeful towers on the floor. The Hatchards salesperson kept giving us additional shopping bags and gold paper bookmarks as if we would somehow dematerialize if not adequately rewarded for our patronage. While there, I picked up the Patrick Melrose series, published here individually with muted pastel covers that telegraphed the melancholy contents within.
Beatrice had her books and I had mine. The first Patrick Melrose book, Never Mind, takes place over the course of a day in the life of a five-year-old boy from an aristocratic family: his mother, a drug-addled narcissist; his father, a sadist. The boy Patrick meanders about the family house in Provence, neglected by the adults who are supposed to care for him. When he is summoned by his father and sexually abused—a heartbreaker of a scene told entirely from the child’s bewildered perspective—it’s the most parental attention he ever gets.
Reading this on the train, I immediately choked up, and as our train pulled into our station I found it hard to make any sound, never mind the customary maternal chatter or parental exhortation. Beatrice was across from me, though far off in a very different corner of English literature with Blyton’s St. Clare’s series.
“Ack, our stop!” she cried in mild panic, looking up from her book as if at any moment the world outside could slip from her grasp. “I was at the best part!” She didn’t have time to see my tears before they were wiped away. Certain stories children are not prepared to hear. Sometimes adults aren’t either.
You would think that as we age, tales of other people’s suffering wouldn’t tug at us so insistently. In fact, the opposite can be true. The triggers are more numerous and more readily accessed, the losses felt more acutely. When you read about an injured child or an ignored brother or an estranged parent, you can more easily intuit their pain. Nostalgia goes from being a light feeling of déjà vu to something more primal and raw. The span of history constricts as decades-old horrors no longer seem quite so distant.When I was growing up, the Holocaust felt like ancient history; now it seems to have taken place yesterday.
The greater stakes can make every tragic plot turn ever more real and painful. In the second volume of the Melrose series, Bad News, Patrick is in his twenties and addicted to heroin. One very long night, while bingeing on an appalling mixture of substances, he receives a message from home that his estranged father, the man who tormented him throughout his childhood, has died. The bad news of the title is multifold: a father has died, a son has been nearly destroyed, their relationship has been poisonous from beginning to end, any possibility of reconciliation ruined.