Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

You know, this is even harder than picking one that makes me happy?

So, I'm throwing in the towel and picking an easy one (for me)--and something where nobody will mind the spoilers.

Thirteen Reasons Why: I read this book a mere two months after one of my friends committed suicide. I have no idea why I chose to pick up the book then--my library was reading it for a book club, but I didn't have much of an interest in going (no way in heck did I want to talk about my experiences with this book). And you know? I still feel like kind of an idiot for putting myself through that so soon after the fact.

This book helped me deal with my emotions in a lot of ways, but it made me sad for a lot of reasons (obviously). It made me sad to hear my friend's voice in the tapes instead of Hannah; it made me sad that there can be so many warning signs and you just won't see them because you're not looking; it made me sad because Hannah tried to ask for help but didn't know how to accept it; it made me sad because I knew exactly how Clay felt since he wasn't close to Hannah and didn't feel able to mourn her because of it; it made me sad that a lot of people complained that this book was unrealistic because Hannah's reasons were dumb and juvenile.

I don't usually comment on how other people feel about books. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I've stopped reading reviews of this one altogether because this book is just too personal, too special, to me. But, to me, anyone can look at something someone else is going through and even if they want to die, they can say, "Wow, that's a stupid thing to be upset about," but you never really know how it affects that person, do you? My friend was the epitome of perfection--at least to me. She had perfect grades, she was beautiful, she was popular, she was a nerd in a lot of ways and she was proud of it and people loved her for it, and she was a friend to everyone. I'll never know in a million years why she did what she did because looking from the outside, it seemed that things could not possibly be better. And after going through something where someone I considered to be a best friend told me it was a stupid thing to be upset about and how she'd "gone through worse than that"--that really killed me. And it's something that stopped me from getting help that I probably needed, stopped me from talking to anyone about what I was going through, and stopped me from trying to get better. And that was pretty dang awful. Because I know from the outside, all my reasons for what I was going through probably looked pretty stupid, too.

So this book makes me sad because of what people say about it and what it represents to me. And that's sad because this is one of my favorite books, but I don't think I'll ever have the strength to reread it, or talk to other people about it because it's just too overwhelming.

I'm sorry this post got really personal. It's hard to talk about this book and separate myself from it.