"A Good Cry: The Pleasure of the Young Adult Tearjerker" by Leslie Patron

For a first time in every person’s life, an acquaintance or loved one your very own age passes away. In my life, that person was Marie, an unremarkable, bookish girl with whom I attended elementary school. Marie and I were never friends, but not for lack of trying. I clung to a group of likeminded outcasts; Marie, preferring solitude, remained closed-off from the fourth-grade social scene. Our mothers would nudge us to invite her to parties. She would attend but sit to the side, observing festivities with clasped hands.

I was in high school when Marie had a grand mal seizure and drowned in her suburban bathtub. She was the sole person home at the time. With a nudge from my mother, I attended Marie’s rosary. I felt guilty for being unmoved: the proper reaction to death is to grieve, to cry. Instead I contemplated my own mortality. Instead I mythologized Marie.

I reflected on the years atop her prayer card: 1981 to 1999. These were the precise years I had lived so far. Seated behind a trio of weeping girls, I wondered if Marie had become a socialite in High School and these girls were part of her clique. Perhaps they, like me, were self-absorbed, caught in the throes of their own mortality. Marie was laid out in a prom dress. I imagined her slow dancing, sipping from a flask beneath her date’s lapel, fogging the windows of a station wagon. I imagined her sitting aside with clasped hands. The gown was white with a full skirt; it resembled a wedding gown. As revealed by the conversation on the van ride home, this resemblance did not escape notice. Marie, had it been among her goals, did not survive to marry.

This story came to mind as I set out to analyze nine young-adult tearjerkers. All nine books have teenage, female protagonists who either suffer from terminal or debilitating illnesses or are the loved one of another character—also teenage and female—who is suffering from terminal or debilitating illness. The stories surrounding the characters in these novels do not mirror Marie’s circumstances, but they do mirror one another’s. Thus, a formula for a teen girl’s death is clear across these nine books, and a prominent set of metaphors around girlhood illness as it relates to privilege, virginity, femininity and beauty emerges. Through an analysis of reader reviews on Amazon.com, I have identified some reasons that readers are drawn to these texts. In this paper, I relate the preferences of the tearjerkers’ readership to six metaphors the genre perpetuates.

The nine books I have chosen were published between 1973 and 2006. These titles, while not exhaustive, represent a phenomenon in young-adult literature worthy of exploration. I have analyzed a diverse palette of work. Lurlene McDaniel, authoress of Till Death Do Us Part, has published more than 40 tearjerkers including several bestsellers. Sharing Sam is a tearjerker marketed as a romance novel. Sunshine was a smash hit in the 1970s; the made-for-TV movie popularized John Denver’s music. Side Effects, while less popular, is important as an outlier. Even on the book jacket, Side Effects is aware of it’s placement in a genre where readers “know [the protagonist] will be dead by the last scene." Instead, Goldman Koss tells the story of a gutsy, outspoken girl with lymphoma who goes “through unspeakable torture and painful treatments, but walks away fine in the end” (Goldman Koss, Book Cover).

To assess the audience for the teen tearjerker, I synthesized data collected from book reviews written by readers on Amazon.com. While prominent themes emerged in my analysis, there are limitations to this method. An obvious limitation is that, unlike a survey, in which respondents react to variables the researcher selects in advance, online reviews are open-ended. If a reader did not indicate, for example, if she cried while reading a tearjerker, there is no way to know if she shed tears. While the percentage of readers whose comments fall under a particular theme may seem small, it is important to consider the element of chance involved.

It is also worth noting that very little demographic information is available on the site. Amazon.com does not track the age of reviewers, but site policy requires that reviews written by readers under 13 years old are listed online as “A Kid’s Review.” Some reviewers indicate their age in the text of their review; others offer details from which I could calculate their age (e.g., “I first read this book ten years ago when I was twelve years old.”). Many reviewers leave no clue as to their age. I attempted, at first, to track the gender of reviewers by scanning the reviews for gendered language (e.g., “I hope when I’m a mother…”) or using the reviewer’s name as a clue. However, due to high instances of difficult-to-code information, I determined this method to be unsound. It was important to me not to presume a reviewer’s gender without identifying evidence. It does seem that a large portion of reviewers are girl-identified, but I cannot offer an exact percentage.

One obstacle I encountered is the variance in the number of reviews per book on the site. Several factors might account for this variance, from a novel’s popularity to how recently it was published. Readers reviewed Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, a widely popular novel published in 2004, more than 1,000 times on Amazon.com at the time of my research. In contrast, Norma Klein’s Sunshine, quite popular upon its release in 1973, was reviewed just 36 times. Some recent titles were reviewed just a few times. Amy Goldman Koss’ Side Effects had the fewest at four reviews. This variance in reviews per book would sway a comprehensive analysis. Instead, I chose to analyze the twenty “most helpful” reviews for each book.

A theme that emerges in the Amazon.com reviews is the idea that a tearjerker teaches the reader valuable lessons about the inevitability and permanence of death, both for oneself and for one’s loved ones. Time and again readers comment on the new “perspective” or “outlook” they gained as a result of reading a tearjerker. Like the ailing characters and their loved ones portrayed in the novels, the reviewer claims to have reached “the moment of maturation” in which she will “define [herself] in terms of [her] own death, in terms of [her] own not being” (Trites, 159). As one reviewer puts it, “you never know when it all might end for you.” On the whole, readers feel empowered by their new knowledge. One reviewer offers an aspiration, “[A Summer to Die] has given me a perspective I didn’t think an unimportant teenager could have. Life is too short. […] Instead of dwelling on death, you should make the most of life when you still have it.” Another reviewer reflects, “After reading [this book], I had a new appreciation for those around me and the delicate nature of life.” Many reviewers reflect that they have never lost anyone close to them, particularly anyone their own age. As one reviewer reveals, “The reality of dealing with the death of a loved one, especially my sister, did not occur to me before I read this book.”

Fascinatingly, reviewers do not seek a removed and scholarly approach to gaining new perspectives on death; they seek to learn via catharsis. More than any other quality, readers dote on these books’ ability to make them cry. Several reviewers privilege “a good cry,” one that “makes you feel like [you have] gone on a journey with the characters.” Reviewers boast of their sobs, both in terms of quantity and style. One reviewer brags, “While I read this book I cried so hard. I locked myself up in my bathroom sobbing for hours on end. […] I love this book!” Another reviewer shares that her favorite tearjerker is “only for people who truly know how to cry,” implying that there is an authentic way to cry and learning to do so is a specialized skill.

These themes gain significance alongside the fact that many reviewers report identifying strongly with the characters in tearjerkers. As one reviewer states, “I got so involved in [the characters’] lives that I was in the book too!” Another reviewer says, “It makes you feel as though you are [the ailing character’s] best friend and you have to get through it along with her.” Other reviewers actively seek similarities between their own lives and the lives of the protagonists; as one reviewer puts it, “I felt I knew both [protagonists] and had a connection with them since I took ballet and […] [like the characters in the book] my dance teacher’s name is Linda and I have a good friend named Julie.” Depending on a particular novel’s point of view, the reader is able to gain insight into a role in a death story. In the case of three novels, A Time for Dancing, My Sister’s Keeper, and Phoenix Rising: or How to Survive your Life, the narration alternates between the loved one and the ailing character, enabling the reader to identify with both perspectives.

Tearjerker novelists frame the experiences surrounding death—be it one’s own death or mourning a loved one—as rites of passage for their protagonists. Thus readers who identify strongly with characters are likely taking test run rites of passage. Tearjerkers then act as a set of training wheels, preparing readers, via a simulacrum of death, for the inevitable real life experiences of dying, navigating illness and watching loved ones pass away.

One question raised by these findings is whether or not these books truly prepare readers for deaths yet to come. Several adult reviewers believe this is the case. One reviewer reflects on a scene in A Summer to Die: “I remember being shocked […] when [Maria and David] show Meg where they would bury the baby if it died. I thought this was a horrible concept, as did Meg. But Maria and David’s honesty stayed with me. I pondered my own denial of the way life can be after my own baby, Marie, was stillborn in 1993. We read, and we remember, and we realize there are [writers] who understand us in this world.” Another adult reviewer shares that, upon reading Sunshine, she changed her behavior as a preemptive strike against the possibility of her own abrupt death. “This story of [a teen mother’s] death affected me so much that when I found out I was pregnant I started a journal for my kid. Not the usual ‘I felt you kick today’ but a journal of how I feel about certain subjects, my interests, hobbies, things I wanted my child to know about me and about life in general. I wanted to do this […] in case something ever happened to me before my child grew up. They would be able to know who their mother was.”

Readers also suggest that tearjerkers help them to cope with loss that they have already experienced. As one reader remarks, “I didn’t know how to deal with [the death of the love of my life]. I had no one to talk to so I started to read. […] [Till Death Do Us Part] did more than help, it [got] me through it when I really needed someone.” One thirteen-year-old reviewer received A Summer to Die as a gift when her older cousin died of leukemia. She remarks, “I cried the whole way through. This book was so much like my own life that I was scared when I read it. [I realized that] I am not alone.”

Several reviewers make a point of absorbing as many tearjerkers as they can. They find tearjerkers to be “addictive” and admit to reading particular novels as many as “15 times or more.” One reviewer reveals that she has read “over 20 of [Lurlene McDaniel’s] books” while another has read so many that she calls the novels her “Lurlenes.”

How can theory give us a framework with which to orient ourselves towards the reader/text relationship? Influential theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt describes reading as “a transaction, a two-way process involving a reader and a text at a particular time under particular circumstances” (Rosenblatt, 268). Drawing on existing knowledge and a reservoir of past experiences, “the reader undergoes a lived-through experience with the text” (Connell, 27). Rosenblatt posits that the reader must make a crucial choice “early in the reading event” (Rosenblatt, 268)—the choice of what type of “prominent stance” to adopt (Rosenblatt, 270). If the reader takes an “efferent stance,” she will focus on gaining a new arsenal of knowledge to take with her when the reading experience is complete (Rosenblatt, 269). This stance is prominently adopted when a reader studies her history text book or a manual. A reader adopts an “aesthetic stance” when she “allows” “personal feelings, ideas and attitudes” to “rise into [her] consciousness” (Rosenblatt, 269). This stance is prominently adopted when a reader becomes engrossed in a novel for pleasure. As Rosenblatt points out, most reading stances fall on a continuum between efferent and aesthetic. My analysis of the Amazon.com reviews indicates that this is the case for readers of the tearjerker. On one hand, readers privilege catharsis. On another hand, they seek to gain a skill set to navigate future experiences of death, loss and mourning.

Despite this synchronicity between reviewers’ comments and Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory, books in the tearjerker genre offer readers a flawed model for learning about death, loss and mourning. They offer readers a stylized account of death; this perpetuates “not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but the stereotypes […] the use of [illness] as metaphor” (Sontag, 3). An important next question is if, in the case of the tearjerker, a stylized representation of death obscures the chance for an authentic efferent reading.

The table below shows the similarities between the ailing characters circumstances across the nine tearjerkers I read. These similarities are a starting point from which to examine the metaphors perpetuated by these texts.

It is important to note that the majority of ailing characters come from a moneyed background. Thus, they are able to reap benefits that the vast majority of readers would never access. In Till Death Do Us Part, April’s wealthy father places “some calls to European facilities” when he is dissatisfied with “FDA regulations” (McDaniel, 137). When her boyfriend dies of cystic fibrosis, April’s father rents a house in on a tropical isle where the family can recuperate for six months. In Sharing Sam, Isabella receives state-of-the-art treatments in a facility miles from home. The parents in My Sister’s Keeper are able to harvest designer embryos and give birth to the perfect donor for their sickly daughter. The list goes on. The one outlier is the character of Kate in Sunshine, a stay-at-home mom whose husband is a struggling musician. Kate, however, opts to forgo treatment in order to “die peacefully with some semblance of sanity” (Klein, 130).

Many of these tearjerkers glaze over the physicality that comes with terminal or debilitating illness. The novels instead focus on the emotional landscape of death. Thus, the writers bypass the technical or painful aspect of chemotherapy for the angst of “my first wig”. In a rare moment of intertexuality, Sunshine’s protagonist Kate comments on this trope of the genre. She says, “I keep thinking of that movie Love Story […] [The ailing character] never even went for medication! That’s so unrealistic! […] It makes the whole thing unreal as if you could die without pain or ugliness. How come her hair didn’t fall out? How come she didn’t throw up every day?” (Klein, 144).

In each book I read, the dying girl possessed a preternatural beauty, as if her beauty were the consolation prize for too-soon death. In Sunshine, Kate’s body, marred beneath her skin, takes on an improved outer beauty near death. Comparing her post-cancer countenance to headshots from “before [she] got sick,” Kate remarks, “I am very photogenic now, I look like a model” (Klein, 125). In A Summer to Die, Meg is ungainly and gawky, while cancer-ridden Molly is poised and beautiful, resembling “a picture on a Christmas card” (Lowry, 19).

In some ways, these narratives support the following cancer metaphor that Sontag identifies: “cancer is the deadly arrow that could strike anyone” (Sontag, 33). A beauty metaphor that pervades our culture is that beauty acts as a shield against tragedy. This idea is evidenced in countless children’s stories in which the young, beautiful princess not only survives harrowing circumstances but live happily ever after. In fairy tales, outer ugliness is a symbol for inner ugliness (ugly girls are usually cast as ugly stepsisters or witches) and outer beauty is a symbol for inner beauty (pretty girls play the role of princess). Ugly girls then are deserving of ugly fates while lovely girls are deserving of lovely fates. When an adolescent, particularly one raised on princess narratives, reads that a beautiful girl can die of cancer, it has a strong impact. The character’s beauty serves to amplify the tragedy of her passing; she must die in the full bloom of youth, only able to cash in on her beauty-privilege from her deathbed. The reader knows to sympathize with a pretty character, particularly if the author shows her to be chaste, virtuous and feminine. Being pretty may not omit the fact of death, but it does sweeten the blow.

The dying girls in these tearjerkers are linked by dreams of the future, most of which involve fulfilling traditional feminine roles: being a “good girl.” Molly of A Summer to Die is a would-be Angel of the House; her two biggest dreams are marriage and motherhood. She spends her hours gazing at flowers, sketching her dream wedding gown and sewing “tiny nightgowns and sweaters” for a neighbor’s unborn child (Lowry, 92). In Phoenix Rising: Or How to Survive your Life, Helen remarks “I want to make love [one day] and get married. I want to have a baby or two. I can’t imagine not having a child” (Grant, 46). In other novels, girls long for first kisses or boyfriends. Chloe in The Courage to Live would do anything to date heartthrob Todd Bowers; she wants to feel “like the heroine of some old-fashioned novel” (Kent, 14). In Sharing Sam, Alison convinces her secret teen-dream boyfriend to abandon their love affair and court Isabella, her best friend who worries she will die of cancer without her first kiss.

The authors are able to fulfill the fairy tale expectation of happily ever after by writing for their heroines what Sontag calls “an aestheticized death” (Sontag, 21); in all but one death scene, “a preternatural serenity” near death accompanies the heroine’s preternatural beauty (Sontag, 24). In A Summer to Die, Meg visits her sister near death. She says, “For the first time in my life I feel bigger, older than Molly. But not more beautiful. I would never be more beautiful than Molly” (Lowry, 136). When Molly dies, she goes peacefully; “she just close[s] her eyes and [never] open[s] them again” (Lowry, 139). In some cases, the dying girls “become more conscious as they approach their deaths” (Sontag, 31). In Sunshine, Kate reflects that she has matured considerably with cancer; she says, “I see in [my face] the spark of laughter that made me such a happy child and the traces of wisdom that made me a mother. I see the pain and beauty of childbirth, the agony of loss of health, the peace for trying to gain freedom from it. I see a woman. I don’t look like a girl anymore” (Klein, 125). “Good girls” die peaceful deaths, gaining in maturity, beauty and wisdom.

In Sunshine and A Time for Dancing, the reader hears first-person accounts of what it is like to die. Both books present death as an idyllic dreamscape. Kate’s last conscious thought is about how she had “[kept herself] a virgin until [marriage]”; this thought is followed by a vision of her daughter playing, with “sun […] so pretty on her hair” (Klein, 223). When she dies in this dream state, the reader is reminded of Kate’s “good girl” status. In A Time for Dancing, Juliana has a vision of herself “dancing in the clouds with a wonderful […] old man” and remarks that she is “getting ready” for a “banquet [that] will come soon” (Hurwin, 244). Both accounts imply a sense of closure upon death. Juliana’s dream guarantees a sort of heaven where the “wonderful […] old man” presides (Hurwin, 244).

Another metaphor perpetuated by these novels is the idea that illness legitimizes the protagonist’s angst. Whether the protagonist is the infirm or the loved one of the infirm, she has reason to cry; encroaching death confirms and condones her powerlessness. Her guilt is acceptable; her self-hatred is merited. In Side Effects, Izzy’s Aunt tells her, “you’re entitled to throw as big a tantrum as you like, as often as you like” (Koss, 125). There is an element of spectatorship in these death stories; the dying protagonist is a sort of starlet, a dazzling martyr with her name all in lights. She captivates doctors, her parents, her peers. In Phoenix Rising, Jessie remarks on the mystifying experience of observing her sister’s death. She says, “Helen slipped through our fingers like a sunny day. We thought it would be summer forever” (Grant, 4).

The loved ones share in the spotlight of death. In My Sister’s Keeper, Anna remarks on the experience of being “the girl with the sick sister;” she says “bank tellers [give me] extra lollypops; principals know me by name. No one has ever been outright mean to me” (Picoult, 131). In this spirit, the loved one is lauded for selflessness. In Phoenix Rising, Jessie imagines herself in the eyes of her peers: “Poor Jessie, they say, she’s had it pretty tough, but it’s amazing how she’s pulled her act together” (Grant, 14). When Isabella dies in the final chapter of Sharing Sam, Alison is rewarded for sharing her boyfriend with her dying friend. She reunites with her teen-dream boyfriend, with whom she has now shared a significant rite of passage: the death of their mutual companion.

The metaphors perpetuated by tearjerker novels do not offer an accurate representation of death. However, the genre’s active and enthusiastic readership suggests that an aestheticized death is evocative for readers even though it does not correspond with reality. The protagonists of these texts are idealized; the readers identify with them though they could never match up to them in real life. The novels guide readers through this idealized protagonist’s painless and positive experience with death. Through this reader/text transaction, readers are able think about death and what it would be like to die; they experience a symbolic death of their own that satisfies by quelling their fears about death.

Grant, Cynthia D. Phoenix Rising: Or How to Survive Your Life. New York: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1991.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response.” Theory Into Practice. 21(1982).: 268-277.

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

Leslie Patron is an MFA Literary Arts candidate at Brown University in Providence, RI.