Whenever I get a break from my normal routine I find I get through a lot of books. On a recent break, I found myself impacted by a book so much I had to leave where I was and go back to my room to take it in. It actually made me cry, not literally ugly man crying, but the odd small tear.
This got me thinking about how I do find things more emotionally impactful than I used to.
Reading chic lit
I recently read three chic lit books in a very short space of time: Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Everything I Know About Love. The first thing I’d like to do is wholeheartedly recommend them all. I found each one fascinating and in the case of the last two, I found intimate human stories about life and love over an extended period of time. The first one was still fascinating but in a different way and it’s a bit of a harder sell as it’s sort of a dysfunctional set of relationships across a bunch of decidedly middle-class people.
The second thing I want to do is dispute the title of chic lit that these books sometimes get slotted under, albeit people do this a lot less now and are seeing sense.
Novels identified as chick lit typically addressed issues of contemporary womanhood — particularly romantic relationships, female friendships and workplace struggles — in humorous and lighthearted ways. Chick lit protagonists tended to be heterosexual women in their late twenties and early thirties, living in metropolitan areas.
Wikipedia
Okay, to some extent that definition actually applies to these books to different degrees (albeit only one has funny reflections), but we all know chic lit is largely meant as a pejorative and that does these (award-winning in some cases) books a disservice. What you’re actually getting is very well-written books about female protagonists finding themselves, love and their way through life and it’s gloriously interesting.
Emotionally impacted
When I was emotionally impacted by Everything I know About Love and was considering the fallout I found myself wondering why this is a more frequent occurrence? I’m not talking about the difference between being an emotionless machine and a man who bawls at the slightest thing – but if this is a spectrum I have certainly moved along it.
The question was why? The answer: life experience, I’m just not sure everyone reaches the same endpoint.
As I track back through my lift you start knocking off things you had not experienced yet. Reversing back through time with a suitable VHS tape rewind effect I can knock off the list: –
- Experiencing extended career and economic stress
- People I am close to dying
- People experience long periods of painful, terminal illnesses
- Someone literally trying their best to commit suicide
- Been through a divorce
When you take these things off your life experience and expunge them from the complex things that make up what constitutes you is it that much of a leap to realise things impacted you less? It’s not that you’re a worse person, it’s just you can’t contextualise it enough.
Life and art
As life progresses you notch up experience and those experience allow you to conextualise the art you observe. This ensures your empathy for the situation the protagonists are experiencing grows. This empathy should transcend similarity in the protagonist themselves (age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc). This was certainly the case with Everything I Know About Love, despite the protagonist being very different from me.
I don’t want to spoil the novel, as the incident is quite pivotal to the main protagonist’s journey, so let’s use a different example that’s older and less specific.
Eons ago when it was first released I watched the film Brassed Off. It’s about the impact of the coal mines closing on a community framed through the communities brass band competing in a competition. I’d have been around 25 when I first watched it. At this time in my life I was three years out of University and riding a career that would broadly rise with the longest period of economic growth in UK history. The only hardship I’d experienced was my right eye suffering a detached retina. I watched Brassed Off and it was a comedy drama which also happened to feature Tara Fitzgerald who I found incredibly attractive. I recognised the events were sad, but they didn’t cut straight to the heart. It remained funny, with some sad elements and a very attractive woman in it.
When I watched it a second time many years later I’d experienced a period of career stress that made me feel like I’d been cut off from everything I assessed my value through. The film was no longer a comedy and instead it was a heartwrenching community tragedy and a story of human pride and perseverance. It made me cry. I am not sure I could watch it again.
I had a very similar experience with The Full Monty, another film that was a comedy when I first watched it and when I watched it a second time hit me to my emotional core. This is another film, released at a similar time, and watched again at a broadly similar life-stage.
I could go on, but for brevity I will say there are numerous examples across books, TV and film that impact me different now, as opposed to how they would have then. You don’t even want to get me started on how I have trouble with stories that have people suffering terminal illnesses over a period of time even if it’s only a background element. It can make medical dramas very challenging! Gone are the days when I could watch the best years of E.R and easily ride through it.
And let’s face it, the only reason I see A Marriage Story as the brilliant, should have won more of its Oscar nominations, classic that it is…is due to the life stage I watched it in. A film that I’d have probably have not even bothered watching at a certain point in my life but I did and it was a very difficult, truthful, hard hitting, emotionally wrenching story of people falling apart due, in some ways, to no fault of their own and changing expectations over time.
Different results
People may find it funny I’ve become a bit of an emotional sap when it comes to the media I watch. I don’t think so. I think it’s part of my life experience that has made me a fuller and more rounded person. If you think about it, what’s the other result?
The other result is these life experiences don’t soften you, they harden you. They don’t allow you to empathise they make you more cold-hearted and indifferent. The sad thing is this happens.
You see it all the time in the modern world. People who make choices and have views that you can’t fully compute because it’s hard to understand how the issues they’ve experienced over their life could not have made them more empathetic to the plight of others. Did they not have any experiences that allowed for this to happen? Do they have experience but they choose to only transfer the empathy gained to subsets of people? For some that will be true, we can guess at the types. For others it is literally the case they’ve taken different things from their life experiences.
The stories they form around them are different.
And, finally…
I believe everything in life is a choice. I’m not saying that choice is easy. Sometimes your life is so hard it’s hard to see the choice or it might be a long while before you get to make it or feel ready to, but, unless your life is endlessly oppressive at some point you’ll have moments when you can make the choice.
I get this sort of statement is subject to a legion of whataboutism and disclaimers on blog posts that feel like those endless pieces of read-out text that appear at the end of US drug adverts. If you don’t believe it’s true, think about what that actually means and how dystopian it is?
You get to choose whether your life experiences make you wiser or turns you into someone with a shotgun on a porch.
Choose empathy.