They Both Die at the End...and Why I Love Melancholy Fiction

I recently power-read through Adam Silvera's They Both Die in the End.  Compared to my more literary-minded friends, I'm a notoriously slow reader, someone who views books as something to be consumed at a leisurely pace.  Philip Roth once said you're not really "reading" a novel if you can't finish it within two weeks.  Philip Roth would not approve of how long books sit on my bed stand.

But Silvera's They Both Die in the End was not the kind of book I could put down.  I initially thought this was just because I desperately wanted to know the end, to know if my theory was correct (for the record, it wasn't), and to see where the book would take itself.  I've never read any of Silvera's novels (though I probably will now), and based on online forums, the sadness of the book is not unfamiliar to his bibliography, and he has continually matured as a writer.  I could still see the faults in the novel; it meanders too much, stretching plot that can clearly be foreseen, and the shifting nature of the narrators (it's written in first-person, but a first-person where we have roughly a dozen narrators) caused confusion when the names were too similar (specifically Delilah and Deidre).  But the book is a jolt, and sneaks up on you.  For a novel where he literally tells you the ending in the title, you spend much of the story wondering what the twist will be-how can an author write a compelling work of fiction if you "know the ending" before you hit the copyright page.  That he still crafts a meaningful friendship, that you'll burst into tears around ten pages before it ends, and how the last sentence lingers like a giant ellipsis (a confident move I'm not familiar with seeing in YA fiction) is all terrific.  It's a great read, and (hey Hollywood!) would make a superb movie in the wake of Love, Simon.

In conversations with people, I have discovered two things, one I knew and one I didn't.  First, the book's title, before even getting to its contents, scares off people.  I was shocked by the number of book-loving people I know who instantly wouldn't try the book because they don't want the "sad ending" that the novel's title promises.  I think we all, on some level, judge a book by its cover, but I'm floored that we also would dismiss the title.  I, for one, bought the book based on the title (and a quick survey of LGBT-themed YA lit that produced this as the best-reviewed one on the list...so this literally was a sale wrought by Love, Simon).

The second thing I knew people would say-"why, John, do you always like sad books?"  It's true, and not something I can counter-punch, nor would I want to do so.  After all, I think literature, movies, TV, theater-it all becomes more important when you have some sort of sacrifice.  I'm not a genre snob, but I'll admit that most of the genres that I gravitate away from are subjects where there's little chance of an unhappy ending (sports films, comedies) or ones where a sad ending is likely, but there's rarely emotional sacrifice (horror, where death is inevitable).  In fact, arguably my favorite line in a movie might well be from The Hours, where Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf utters "Someone has to die in order that the rest of us value life more."  I kind of agree with that in fiction-you need to have some sort of tangible, unexpected sacrifice to reach an end goal (a fact that's mostly definitely true in The Hours).

But I thought it would be interesting to test this assessment that I "only like sad movies" because I recently made a Top 100 list of my favorite films and a Top 25 list of my favorite TV shows, and in doing so, I wanted to see how often they end with sad, happy, or ambiguous endings.

I had to make a couple of rules for myself while searching the list.  For starters, romances where the main characters don't end up together is automatically a "sad" ending.  I also included any film where the main character had to die to be a "sad" ending.  This meant that films like Casablanca, for example, qualify as a "sad" ending even though you could argue it was happy in the sense that Rick is better for his experience in the picture.  I initially thought I'd scrap it and just say "if I'm crying when the credits roll" it counts as sad, but then I remembered that for someone who is weirdly closed-off from emotional vulnerability in real-life, I cry at the drop of a hat in movies.  I also discounted the TV shows relatively quickly, as I found that very few shows end with a proper "sad' ending, even if a number of shows end with main characters dying, so I went solely with movies.  So I went with my own subjective analysis and found...

...that I really, truly like sad movies.  55 of my favorite movies, a solid majority of them, despite the fact that (I can't find proof of this, but I'm going based on personal, anecdotal evidence) most of the movies I've seen have had a happy ending.  You have to make it to 18th place on the list (Jurassic Park) before I can give a firm "this is a happy ending," even though there are "ambiguously" ended films earlier on the list like The Tree of Life.  With the exception of Malick's opus, all of my Top 10 have decidedly sad movies, most of them romances (a therapist would call this projection), and my highest-ranked romance with a happy ending, is one where our main characters go through emotional hoops to get to that ending (Before Sunset).  So yes, apparently I like sad endings, which is how I ended up reading a book called They Both Die at the End without reservations.  And I'm glad I did, as it is the sort of affirming novel that hits you in the stomach and makes you want to treasure your time with the characters (and real-life people) all the more.