Crying in public and TFIOS

I have a unique talent at being in public while finishing the books that make me cry. I turn the final pages while screwing up my mouth and shaking a little, telling myself Don't cry Don't cry Don't cry, but then--Oh, what the hell--I let myself go. If a book is so good that it can break the fourth wall of reading and make me sob, I think I should honor those feelings and blubber on the bus. Or the elliptical, or the subway, or in a cafe, etc.
You can see where this was going. I had a long walk down a long avenue, in tears, after I finished The Fault in Our Stars. (A great thing about NYC is that nobody bats an eye if you are weeping while you walk.)

Which is not to say that TFIOS was a morbid book, or a sad book, or a particularly tragic one. It was a human book, and it bursted forth with all of the emotions and experiences and fears and joys of being a human being in this crazy and beautiful and sometimes cruel world. It was more a book about living life than dying.

After the initial tears dried, I felt grateful. Grateful for having spent a few hundred with Hazel and Augustus and their wonderful parents (for whom my heart broke a thousand times) and friends and Sisyphus the Hamster and the Dutch assistant whose name I will never be able to spell nor pronounce. I don't know what else to say about TFIOS, other than I loved it.

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