Day 613: Beside Myself

Oh, memory, you're such an equivocator (only just didn't say cunt). I am beside myself, in that I wrote this almost a week ago and basked in the pleasure of writing it... so then forgot that I never posted it. 

I love it when I close the last page of a novel and have to sit down for a proper good cry afterwards, especially if it’s the moved, love-fuelled kind of cry. The bleakly tragic kind of cry is powerful too, but the love one is more powerful.

Unseamly

I love the tension of a tragedy. As a teenager, Romeo and Juliet had me on the edge of my seat every time. When I watched the Baz Luhrmann film, much later, and saw the Post Haste van missing Romeo with its vital message, I was shouting at the screen (I saw it on DVD, not in the cinema. Had I been there, I may have been asked to leave). King Lear, Macbeth (oh, Macbeth – you just didn’t ought to have done that King-killing, sweetheart – you were a good, upstanding man before that, if a little brutal, with all your unseaming of people from the nave to the chops, but you did it in the context of the time and as a warrior. 

And then you went and killed the bloody King, and then MacDuff’s babes so unseemlily, and then even your marriage was on the rocks, and it was partly that dynamic that spurred you on – too late now; your days are numbered and I can only root for you because your writer’s such a genius, and he made me want the best for you, despite yourself).

I love to be fucked with by a book, a film, a show. Less so by people, but sometimes it happens. I like art to shake me, emotionally, like a rat in the mouth of that fictional terrier in my mind.

Anyway, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves did indeed leave me completely beside myself, in the richest of ways. I liked it very much. Thank you, Karen Joy Fowler. What you wrote has made me more involved.