a complicated kindness, indeed

I don’t usually do “sad” – sad movies, sad shows, sad stories, sad books, I try to avoid “sad”, like the plague.

I read a complicated kindness and I know I’ve only been doing this reading thing for a short time, but this is possibly the best book ever. It’s completely heartbreaking. I finished it with the overwhelming urge to just sit and cry for a few hours.

Although sad, the story was brilliantly told, it was amazingly funny, and I could possibly start reading it again right now. Yeah, it was that good.

“My neighbor came out to look at it. She’s an unhappy housewife with the flattest ass I’ve ever seen. Swaths of fabric allocated for a person’s butt billow emptily around hers like a sail.” pg. 100

I totally and completely appreciated all the analogies.

The underlying story was about love and loss. Dealing with loss, I guess. Told by a teenage girl, who’s mother and sister left, as she and her dad try to make sense of their lives. They dealt with the loss very much like most of us deal – block it out, pretend everything is okay, try really hard to figure out what happened, how you’re supposed to move on, and privately grieve a whole lot. It’s a remarkable reminder that we can never win when we have to choose between the “right thing” and our happiness, there is such a fine line, and I guess that’s why most of us hold on to faith and hope so desperately.

And in the end, she asked a question I ponder every day almost, “Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life.”