57) Literary Leaf

Yesterday I finished the Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road, which was made into a movie (Kate and Leo above). It was a deeply depressing look at a mid-life suburban couple's ennui with their life and each other. Towards the very end, there's a crunchy leaf that caught me off guard:

He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn't try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders.[...] The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you start embellishing your own sobs...

This crunchy leaf may skew female, given the generally accepted fact that men cry less than women, so male readers, bear with me. How true, I thought, as I read the paragraph. In an effort to let it all out, it's easy to take it too far and start to wallow in it.

I'd like to think that this is a crunchy leaf, and not just something that my inner drama queen does sometimes. That Yates included it in his novel is a good sign - I wonder if it resonates with other women (and men). It's a unique little nugget. It's not the type of thing you could find out via survey, as few would like to admit that they do something as self-indulgent as embellish their sobs. But the fact that something as personal, emotional and private as crying can be unified by a crunchy leaf makes the theory all the more powerful.