slivers of light
I’m somewhere near the middle of five books at the moment because I’m not the type of reader who can only step in and out of only one world at a time. I realized that all five books cover incredibly dark issues—heroin addiction, alcoholism, insanity/suicide, family deaths/grief, and terminal illness—and like life, most of these stories don’t end with a “happily ever after.”
Regardless of how crazy or hard life has ever gotten for me I’ve always gravitated toward the truths that are harder to swallow, to the struggling and the down and out, and to the things that destroy us.
You’d think I’d want a break from the darkness of everything, but it often makes me feel less alone. It adds a layer of perspective that sometimes I can’t access on my own and it allows me to dive deep into my endless well of empathy. It teaches me to search like hell for the good in things no matter how bad they can sometimes get and I’ll tell ya, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.
I’d like to think my memoir will have these little gifts within it for the reader to find, slivers of light, pieces of good and hope and truth, tiny bits of love and joy that are so raw it hurts, but a good kind of hurt. It’s been that for me, through the writing of it, but we’ll see.
Below are the book titles in case you’re interested or just want a night alone to really feel something. I can only recommend the rereads as I haven’t finished the other three.
-Candy by Luke Davies (a reread)
-Lit by Mary Karr
-The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (a reread)
-H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
-Home is Fucking Burning by Dan Marshall
Do you have a favorite not-so-happy book?