This is not wild bawling, and it doesn’t last long. In any case, if a book has got us once, it will soon have us again. It is, in fact, controlled and measured snivelling – a shot of outward breath, a quickfire sniff or two, and at a push a sigh that comes as a surprise. Yet it retains meaning and significance, and best of all sates a reader’s need for on-page sadness. As the bad news is delivered, the coffin is lowered or the justice miscarried, we can bask in luxurious melancholy and blubber at the travesty of it all.
It takes craft for an author to gather this storm, whether making a child feel deeply involved with a wronged witch, or a cynical adult become stirred by thwarted romance. That writer pulls emotion from within the reader unexpectedly, a benign hand conducting tears for their cathartic qualities. It feels good to sob, and it is difficult to forget a book that makes us do so.
There is a singular comfort in crying because of a book. It is a private outpouring of hidden emotion. It is intense and individual, and completely spontaneous, where tears in the cinema are shared and contagious. It feels easier than crying inside the real world, as if a book cover is a veil behind which repressed sensations can be aired and released.