{"id":254,"date":"2026-06-02T14:16:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T14:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=254"},"modified":"2026-06-02T14:16:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T14:16:17","slug":"the-art-of-the-joyful-tearjerker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=254","title":{"rendered":"The Art of the Joyful Tearjerker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last fall, while leaving a critic\u2019s screening of the film Hamnet<\/i>, I was confronted just outside the door by the production company\u2019s chirpy PR handler. \u201cHow was it?\u201d she asked, as if the rivers of mascara streaming down my cheeks weren\u2019t a clear enough signal. \u201cOh God,\u201d I blurted out, before turning heel toward the bathroom. How to properly describe the garment-rending despair I\u2019d felt in those 125 minutes?<\/p>

Read more What Dogs See<\/a><\/p>

I had known what I was in for. The Maggie O\u2019Farrell novel on which the movie was based had left me in a similar state both times I\u2019d read it. The allure of the literary tearjerker wasn\u2019t new to me either. When I was about 12 and my older sister recalled sobbing in front of her college library over Frank McCourt\u2019s memoir Angela\u2019s Ashes<\/i>, I raced to read it. (I was not deterred when my mother fretted about its \u201cdead babies and dead dreams.\u201d) I wanted<\/i> the raw emotion, and the release, that my sister had reported. And I would seek it out again and again: in Thomas Hardy\u2019s grim Jude the Obscure<\/i> in my early 20s, in Hanya Yanagihara\u2019s unrelenting A Little Life <\/i>in my early 30s. Now that I\u2019m in my early 40s, Hamnet<\/i>\u2014which chronicles the death of Shakespeare\u2019s 11-year-old son\u2014had found me, but it had moved me for more unexpected reasons. Mixed in with its heartbreak was an oddly complementary sensation of joy, and along with all the snot came a kind of neon ecstasy.<\/p>

O\u2019Farrell\u2019s new novel, Land<\/i>, provokes that same unlikely combination in ways that annihilate critiques of her work as \u201cgrief porn.\u201d If the raison d\u2019\u00eatre of the tearjerker is to lure the reader into disorienting sorrow, O\u2019Farrell\u2019s fiction has a more complicated calling\u2014her characters are endowed with a dignity that gives their despair power and meaning. She knows that anguish cannot properly infiltrate a reader who isn\u2019t experiencing the full spectrum of emotions: disappointment, amazement, contentment, frustration, pride, and even unbridled bliss.<\/p>

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Land: A Novel<\/div>
By O’Farrell, Maggie<\/div><\/div>