Comments on: Why Cry?

By: Amalia Gladhart

Amalia Gladhart — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:37:31 +0000

I seldom cry at the end of a novel. What would get me were some of the kids’ books I’d read aloud the babies were younger, things that would have me just blubbering away. And recalling, ruefully (no longer ruthlessly) the way, as a child, I’d snicker at my own mother crying over a book

By: Ruth Horowitz

Ruth Horowitz — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:45:50 +0000

You’re getting soft in your old age, Bill. In a good way.

By: Ruth Horowitz

Ruth Horowitz — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:44:40 +0000

Wow. It’s a wonder he didn’t just move in with you on his own. Seeing as how you have so much in common.

By: Bill Mitchell

Bill Mitchell — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:40:57 +0000

(Hi, Ruth!) I very seldom cry during or after reading, though I sometimes feel a tightening in the back of my throat when fully engaged with a book. I do regularly tear up at the movies or while watching television (the silliest things). Even more regularly, music (a song by Aretha Franklin, for example, or a Bach violin concerto) stirs up tears. And I’ll mist up when I’m enchanted by some combination of music, choreography, and performance. If oxytocin is the proximate cause of many of these tears, I wonder whether it increases as we age. My tears do.

By: rhondasaunders

rhondasaunders — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:26:23 +0000

See what your writing does? It stirs things in people.

By: rhondasaunders

rhondasaunders — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:21:10 +0000

Off topic, I stalked Charles Baxter for a couple of years. I wanted to be him and/or marry him and/or keep him in my basement to write just for me. When I started teaching college English, Feast was required reading. Obviously.

Baxter’s first teaching gig was in a podunk town near my podunk hometown. Later, he taught at Wayne State for a while. I dropped out of a PhD program there, so we’re practically exactly the same.

Ahh, thank you for that opportunity.

By: Ruth Horowitz

Ruth Horowitz — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:15:30 +0000

Or find a different gym.

By: Linda P. Epstein

Linda P. Epstein — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:12:45 +0000

I just don’t go to the gym, because I’m positive I don’t have to do anything more than walk in in my too-tight sweats with my flabby self bulging in all the wrong places to be secretly (or not so secretly) judged by the skinny people who work out all the time. I probably should adjust my attitude.

By: Linda P. Epstein

Linda P. Epstein — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:09:37 +0000

Oh, and I cry at the end, too. Not weeping tears, like you, but more kind of misty like when I’m leaving someone off at the airport. I know I’m going to miss being in the world, being with the characters that I just spent a few hundred pages with.

By: Ruth Horowitz

Ruth Horowitz — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:08:04 +0000

Did I say workout buddies? I meant, random people who go to the gym when I do, and might make eye contract if our paths cross between machines. And who I know would secretly judge me if they saw me weeping while working out.