Things That Made Me Cry While I Had the Flu

It's an incomplete list. With bonus books of the year!

My household has been sick for…months? I honestly couldn’t tell you how long it’s been. Certainly more than a month. Early pandemic vibes! No work, just frustration! In any case, we’ve been watching an ungodly amount of television, and I’m here to report that every single thing made me cry. I am a crier in general, but this past month, whew! It’s been next level. Something about the grief-being unable to work-retail Xmas-sick kid combo is really hitting that sweet spot. Here is a brief list of things that made me cry that I think you should watch.

1. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. I know, there was just another Pinocchio! I did not watch that one. It had Tom Hanks in it. This one, however, dang! I had to explain fascism! And I cried for the last, oh, fifteen minutes? Tears absolutely pouring down my face. It is amazing.

2. When my younger son was sick a thousand years ago (let’s say October? Or maybe early November? Or maybe this summer? Truly! What is time?), we watched all the High School Musical movies. We both love musicals and teenagers in fun costumes and Zefron. (If you need to understand the true poetry of Zefron in this time period, I submit this video as evidence.) This time, though, we kicked into meta gear, and finally binged the first season of High School Musical The Musical The Series. Listen, you will know if this is not for you. But if you think it might be, hear me out: HSMTMTS is heaven. For the uninitiated, HSMTMTS is a show on the Disney channel in which the drama dept at the high school where they filmed the original HSM films is putting on HSM. It’s a faux-documentary. It stars Olivia Rodrigo. The cast gets to sing both the songs from the HSM films and also new songs. I love every minute of it. When did I cry? So glad you asked! I cried when it was the end of the first season and the cast bowed at the end of their performance. I was proud of them! I don’t know what Disney does to its child stars (the most chilling moment in the Selena Gomez documentary about her mental health is when she has a horrible interview experience and she says, shuddering—that was like Disney) but these kids are all so genuinely talented and wonderful. When Miles and I realized that we had actually seen one of the actors in Into the Woods on Broadway this summer—well, we nearly died. It turns out that there are people in the world who need more than one version of this song and I am one of them. Below, please enjoy Troy Bolton fan art by my 9 year old.

3. This is related, in a way. Like many of you, I watched The White Lotus, and like many of you, I loved Haley Lu Richardson’s sweet Portia. I thought her outfits were wonderful. Just very relatable all the way around. But! That is not what made me cry. What made me cry was Haley’s appearance on this late night talk show where she gets surprised by a video chat from Nick Jonas. Her reaction—a combination of shock and love, the true embodiment of fanatical devotion—was so moving to me that I burst into tears. If you’ve ever been a fan—especially of the tween variety—this will get you, too. I’m now hers forever.

4. The Bear. Okay, this is another one that I am late on—I know everyone was “Yes, chef!”-ing their way around town last year, but I just watched, and so here I am. Yes, he’s hot. Yes, Ayo Edeberi is a genius and also wrote on What We Do in the Shadows and is therefore hot and brilliant. The Bear made me cry at the end for all the predictable reasons (grief + small businesses). It also made me think about the time before we opened the bookstore and when all I had to do was write books! LOL! Running a small business (and working in a small business) is literally ten thousand times harder than being a novelist. So if you’re out shopping in the next few days, please be nice to the folks working retail. They deserve that AND (spoiler alert) thousands of dollars hidden in tomato cans.

Late Additions to My Fave Books of the Year List:

Because I published my list of faves in October, I knew there would be some books that I read in the last few months that would have made it onto my faves list, and so it was. Here are a couple more books I loved this year:

-Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

Oh, what delightful fun. I fucking love vampires, but sometimes I forget, and then I go years and years with no vampires! I listened to the audiobook, which is read by Bahni Turpin, one of my favorite narrators.

-Kate Beaton’s Ducks

This graphic memoir is astonishing. How does an artsy young woman wind up working in a remote oil field? And how horrible is it there? I loved this book, and will give it to people who don’t think they love graphic books. (Kate is also the author of one of my all-time favorite picture books, The Princess and the Pony.)

I hope you have a restful holiday, and that you get some sort of real break. We all need it. Here’s hoping that 2023 isn’t such a fucking dickhead of a year.