The first time I cried because of a book was in kindergarten.
I already knew that reading was a way to share information; the red sign with the letters S-T-O-P meant that I should probably wait and look for cars before crossing the street to the park. I already knew that reading could be enjoyable; every spare moment was spent with my nose in a book, meeting new people and traveling to faraway places from the comfort of my living room. What I hadn’t known before, was that reading could make me feel sad as well.
One sunny winter afternoon, our teacher called us up one by one to her trapezoid table to read aloud for her. In the back of my mind, I knew that this was going to be some kind of test, but I never once thought that anything out of the ordinary would happen. In fact, I remember skipping all the way there in classic kindergartener fashion. I was pretty good at reading, so this was going to be a piece of cake!
When I sat down, she took out a book from her file folder, put it on the table, and opened it to the first page. I began to read confidently:
“Today was a bad day. My pet iguana Izzy died.”
I trailed off, looking at my teacher in horror. What kind of a book talked about death and sad things? But she nodded and gestured at me to continue, so I went on.
“…I drew a big heart because I loved him. I wrote that I missed him. I wrote that I would remember him…”
This was getting worse and worse by the second. I didn’t even make it through the third page before I burst into tears. My teacher set down her pen and tried to comfort me, saying “it’s just a story honey” but I was inconsolable. To me, it wasn’t “just a story.” She didn’t understand! Izzy and the boy were the best of friends and now Izzy was gone forever, never to play with his friend again! How did she not see the tragedy of the situation? How did she not feel the boy’s pain?
Up to that point, reading had been solely for entertainment. I never realized that words – mere scribbles on a page – could make me feel sadness, anger, and even despair. Words could make me cry about a boy and his iguana, despite never experiencing death or even having owned a pet. For the first time, I realized that books not only communicated information and the details of a story, but they could also be a means through which to share emotions with others.
After that experience, I avoided books grounded in reality for a while, preferring to stick to my familiar fairy tales all set in worlds where nothing bad ever happened. Rapunzel was trapped in her tower, but she got out eventually, didn’t she? Sure, the goat’s brothers may have been eaten by the wolf, but they were miraculously rescued from its stomach in the end by their clever mother (this of course wasn’t the true ending, but that’s another story). With these kinds of tales, I could always count on there being a happily ever after.
This worked for a while, but my relationship with reading was never quite the same. My definition of reading had been expanded, and I was curious to know what else was possible. Paragraph by paragraph, I began to explore other genres. Bad things did happen occasionally, and that was okay because I now knew that happened sometimes. If the boy was able to get through Izzy’s death, then other characters in other books could also get through their own misfortunes, and ultimately, so could I.