The Value of Sad Stories

I grew up in a laughing house.

Granted, it was sometimes a yelling house, or a screaminghouse, or a crying house – but the important thing was, my family knew how tolaugh it off. Once a week, on Saturday night, my dad and I would drive to thelocal Blockbuster and pick out a movie. I usually did the picking, trailing myhand along the plasticky DVD cases, reading the back of each one in full,removing anything with ‘gratuitous nudity’ from the maybe stack. We only everhad one directive from my mother: “Get something funny. Life is sad enough.”

This stayed with me even after Blockbusters and DVDs werereplaced by Netflix and Hulu, and sitcoms with canned laughter saw competitionfrom a new, more self-aware type of humor: tragicomedy.

But what were the stories I actually sought out, in achildhood decorated by the humor of Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy? Thestories I stayed up at night reading by flashlight in a cocoon of covers? AliceWalker and Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck and Barbara Kingsolver – authorswho understood that to tell a human story, you need pain as well as joy – thesewere the voices who kept me up into the early hours, some nights until the dawnchorus began its birdsong. What did I see in their pain that so drew me in?Celie’s delicious, velvety purple dolor? The way the bipolar farm boy TomHamilton “struggled with greatness”, as Steinbeck told us? Maybe it was how Kingsolver’sAda found, as a bitter adult, that her debilitating limp was all in her head. Ormaybe it was the overarching fact that these characters made me feel less alonewhen they invited me into their personal tragedies.

In my own field of creative nonfiction, I hear people’sconcerns that the modern memoir is oversaturated with sadness. Of course, astory doesn’t need to be sad or controversial or, god forbid, ‘confessional’ inorder to be good; there are many ways to insert complexity beyond tragicoutcomes. It’s worth noting, the saddest thing that has happened to us is notnecessarily the most interesting.

A friend in my writing program once called my work, “sadstories in nature,” which is a fair description. Another friend asked to readmy work; when I told them they might not enjoy it because the subject was sadagain, they asked me, “…do you ever think about writing humor?”

I do.

But when I try to write pure humor, it feels a little empty.Like I’m selling something that’s mostly air. Maybe my customer wantscarbonation. Maybe they read in the daytime, on their phone in the bathroomstall, between work meetings. Maybe they don’t want me to make them cry whilethey’re pooping. I get it; we live in a multi-tasker’s world.

But the thing is, humor needs sadness sometimes. Laughtersprings from a good cry like a mushroom out of wet earth – fecund and colorfuland threatening to poison or sate. Sadness is a beginning – an opening vacuumthat can be filled with joy or humor or redemption or tenderness. When donewell, sadness can prepare a reader for self-reflection in a way that feel-goodwriting seldom does.

Take David Sedaris for example: the poster child of humoressays. He writes from an unhappy childhood, an angry father, a struggle withhis own sexuality. These things give texture to his jokes and render them moreenjoyable because we recognize how thin the partition is between laughing andcrying.

My own self-reflection: If things were never sad, I don’tthink I would have grown up in a house full of laughter. I don’t think I wouldhave known the need for one to balance the other, like a child raised on theequator who doesn’t know the summer-longing that winter brings. I don’t know thatsad events make us stronger, but they do make us more receptive to theemotional spectrum of a story, and that is something that, as writers, we canuse.

In this day, memoir is often critiqued as confessional,navel-gazing, narcissism in commercial form. But my best writing has come fromtragedies – and not simply because they happened, but because I was able to usethem as a runway, to open my story up to a broader purpose, an emotionaluniversal. One that may, someday, make a kid in their blanket cocoon feel lessalone.

My advice in this time of uncertainty: write into the sadness, and see what grows.   

Maggie Wallace reads nonfiction for Barnstorm and is a third-year MFA student in nonfiction at the University of New Hampshire.