Most of you know that I have a slightly lazy left eye. I tend to point it out a lot, especially when anyone tries to take a photo anywhere within a six-mile radius of me. But what most of you don’t know is that this is not my only eye-related defect. I have another one.
Severely overactive tear-ducts. Yep, I’m a crier. A sobber. A weeper. A bawler. A blubberer. And none of it’s pretty.
I always have been. Mum has a photo of me as a two-year-old at a birthday party, hands full of lollies and cake, and I’m crying. Who knows, maybe someone ate all the chocolate bullets, but crying at a party? That just doesn’t seem right to me. 32 years on and I still cry at the most ridiculous things. And I’m not one of these criers whose tears neatly well-up before cascading in symmetrical little trickles down my cheeks. Oh no. At the slightest sense of a tear, the blood vessels in my eyes immediately pop, my face goes red to match them, and my nose decides it wants to join in on all the drip, drip, dripping action as well.
I got to thinking about the fact that I’m a crier because of two things:
1. On Sunday night I cried during JuniorMasterchef. It was seeing a Nanna in tears when her grandson made the Top 20 that set me off. Crying over TV shows is not uncommon to me. I once cried during the Funniest Home Videos grand final. I’m really not discriminating.
2. I went to see Cecelia Ahern at my local Mary Ryan’s book shop last week, and she spoke about how she ‘laughed and cried’ while she was writing her bestseller PS I Love You.
So it seems that Cecelia and I have a lot of things in common:
1. She wrote PS I Love You when she was 21.
2. It only took her three months.
3. She immediately sold the book and followed it up about a week later with the film rights.
4. She’s sold 13 million copies of her books worldwide.
5. She’s Irish.
Wait, sorry, wrong list. That’s all the things we don’t have in common. Here’s the things we do:
1. She doesn’t talk about her books while she’s writing them. Not even with her husband (not that I have one of them. I just substitute husband with parents/sisters/friends/colleagues/cat).
2. She’s obviously a crier too.
It’s uncanny really. I mean, we could almost be sisters.
The only problem is that I haven’t cried while writing my book. Okay, I’ve cried a couple of times, but not because my characters have moved me to do so, but from the sheer pain of bashing my head against the laptop.
So, if I’m a crier, to the point where I cry when my hands are full of cake and lollies or I’m watching a show called Funniest Home Videos (which by title alone tells you that I seriously have a problem), does it mean that I’m doing something wrong in my book because writing it is not making me reach for the recycled loo paper kleenex?
And Cecelia is not alone. Sophie Kinsella says that she cried writing the endings to all her novels. And her novels are light-hearted. Comedy. Laugh-out-loud kind of stuff. I can only conclude that maybe she was crying from relief that the torture of writing the novel was over.
James Frey says he ‘was usually crying as he sat at his computer’. Clearly he doesn’t cry like me, otherwise he wouldn’t have even been able to see the screen through the torrential downpour. Anyway, he was probably just crying because he knew he was about to get outed as a liar for his supposed memoir A Million Little Pieces.
I don’t know. Clearly I’m doing something wrong. I’m a crier but I’m not crying. Maybe I need to kill one of my characters off. Or make one of them wear a velour tracksuit. You know, just add something really sad.
I’ve read Cecelia. I’ve read Sophie and James. And to be totally honest, they may have set their own tear ducts in motion, but none of them moved my overactive wonders to shift even a drop. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I honestly cried reading a novel, but I have a feeling it might have been Are you there God, it’s me, Margaret, circa 1985.
So maybe there’s nothing wrong with my novel, I’m just tougher than I think. Except when it comes to 10-year olds in aprons that is.
Safe in the knowledge that nobody I know reads your blog I can tell you your in good company Kathryn. I can cry at tv ads selling toilet paper! I often cry at anything that involves mild to extreme human endeavour triumphing over overwhelming odds. I think this is because my mind substitutes the individual with moi and therefore I'm crying because in spite of everything my troublesome and complicated mind does to trip me up, 'I' have triumphed! The problem with all this is the expense. Crying in itself is not expensive but crying when sat with others is. As all cry'ers know, crying is a solitary pursuit and not something to do in a crowd, especially when the reason for the blub is inexplicably only known to you! So you need a mechanism to fend off the surge and mine results in frequent trips to the dentist to repair the fillings I've ground down in an attempt to stem the flood. My dentist though, having watched far too much C.S.I. feels that the damage in my mouth is more indicative of late eighties, drug induced dancing at raves. Who am I to convince him otherwise? Drug induced dancing at raves in the late eighties is a far more manly pursuit eh?
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Jeff
Jeff, just the thought of you doing some dance moves at at 1980's rave is enough to send me into fits of tears!!!
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