Something unprecedented happened to me last night. I mean, I don't remember it ever happening. I dig deep into my memory bank and I come up empty-handed. I know it sort of happened a few months ago, but last night it felt like I was entering uncharted territory. I cried over the character in my book. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I'm reading (or rather, just finished) Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex. After that last post, I really hit my stride with the book, reading larger excerpts at a time, working my way through the language, escaping into the story and the characters. There were parts where I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. Not since Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had I done that. All through the first 430 pages, I knew what was coming. I knew that Cal was a man who had lived as a girl for 14 years before he discovered himself. But at that moment of self-revelation, I felt as if I were Cal and the world was crumbling. I'd become so immersed in the character, identifying with her as an adolescent and teen. I recognized so many things about myself in her that when she realized she was actually a he and believed herself to be a "monster," I couldn't help but cry tears of pain, confusion, regret, fear. My heart ached as did Cal's for the life and love lost in that moment. Now, I do recall becoming emotional and teary-eyed during Eggers's What is the What? but that was a completely different experience and circumstance. That was a true story and the struggles and warfare were so shocking and devastating that anyone would cry. Cal is a fictional character. And I was not shocked by his story. It's the way Eugenides tells the story that reaches in, grabs your heart and squeezes the tears from it. I remember the first time a book had a strong impact on my life. It was a few years ago when I read Mrs. Dalloway for Literary Analysis. Every student struggled with it. Woolf's style of writing was like none we'd ever seen before. For weeks we read over the same passages 4 and 5 times. We wrote paper after paper about the institution of marriage, the effects of World War II, Clarissa's flippant ways masking her depression, the significance of the color green, the idea of time as cyclical rather than linear. We got so frustrated with the book that we through it across the room, pounded it against our heads, wrote all over it, tore at it like animals. And that last day, we came into class, and we realized that we loved this book. For all the torture that it had put us through, we had lived with that book and with each other and now it was time to say goodbye. My professor (a true idol of mine) sat on the table up front and read to us the last paragraph. She looked up, her eyes met mine, and they were full of tears. We smiled at each other and I reached up and wiped my own eyes. It wasn't the characters or the story I was crying about. It was the experience of reading the book, the act in itself. What a wonderful gift books are to make you feel such things.