I finished reading Jackie French’s Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies (and promptly gave it to my sister-in-law to read!) It’s a great book and I’m about to order the next two books in the series, but I want to finish my friend Kate Kelsen‘s book Paid to Dance and the new G. R. R.Martin book first. (Don’t get too excited, it’s a prequel to Song of Ice and Fire.) So we’ve got a book about stripping and a different kind of fantasy 😉
I was inspired by Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies to write a character that makes the reader cry (as in when they die…) I’m not going to give the story away but someone dies and I really didn’t expect to care so much but I sobbed! There was another character later in the story and I was thinking ‘Don’t you dare kill ****, Ms. French! Don’t you dare!’ And anyone who has read the Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones) will know that GRRM doesn’t spare many, even reader/viewer favourites. We’ve come to expect it, sadly.
But why??? Why do we want death and fear and decay, dystopian futures and pasts? There’s enough of that in real life, surely? I just finished The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. So much death; many more than the seven poor old ‘Evelyn’ gets. I’m still confused about the ending though…probably would have preferred something a little more like Black Mirror 😉 and perhaps a little more death… ha ha
I have a character in Hotel Deja Vu that dies and another that disappears but I am embarrassed to say that I doubt anyone would give a shit about either of them. God knows I hardly do. They were, I have to admit, mere props for the MCs. I need to go back and re-read them and see if I can care a little more about them. Is it wrong that I want make people cry the way I cried when **** died in Miss Lily, or when the little boy went missing at the end of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or the dog died in Call of the Wild. Am I a sicko? If I am then I am not alone.
P.S. Do we have to suffer in order to learn empathy? Do we have to struggle in order to grow? Just some little ideas I like to think about…
We want to make others feel what we feel (whether that is satisfaction, despair, trepidation, excitement, frustration, hopelessness, etc). To share our experiences, because then we don’t feel so alone. A shared joy is joy doubled, a shared woe is woe halved. Or something or other similar.