Books Aren't Making Me Cry

On music, memory and words

Every summer I wonder whether I’m in the right business.

I go to more live music in the summer than at any other time of the year and more often than not I walk away having had some kind of magical, semi-religious experience. Listening to a band you love with your friends and thousands of other people is like experiencing time all at once – sharing a moment in the present while re-living a thousand moments of a shared past, all the while silently weaving a series of future memories.

Last summer it was Oasis and Cast at Wembley: an experience with two friends so epic it took two weeks to come down from. And most recently it was Latitude Festival with old friends and family – flip-flopped feet black with dust, head pounding with a hangover and heat from the midday sun – as every one of us, aged nine to forty-nine, bounced around to Park Life, punching the air, singing until we were hoarse.

Those moments are joyous, funny, emotional enough to cry tears you didn’t know you were carrying. And they are the complete opposite of sitting alone in a room writing or reading words. On the rare occasion I read or write something funny or sad enough that I want to share it, I’ll look round my office only to be met with dusty paperweights, a half-empty coffee cup and silence.

And if someone put me on the spot and asked me to recall those moments it would take me a while. But I could give you a long list of music-related memories in an instant: from belting out the You and Me Song in a battered Cortina just after a friend got her licence, to the pub full of friends and family singing Like A Prayer the night I got married, to stopping on a street corner, overwhelmed with tears at Elgar’s Nimrod and memories of my Dad.

I did not go looking for any of those moments. They found me, like music often does. Music knocks hard and loud on the door and tells me what I need, which is to cry or laugh or dance – sometimes all three. Music is the itinerant aunt in my life, the one who rocks up with her chipped nail polish, back-combed hair, Talking Heads t-shirt hanging off one shoulder, voice hoarse from smoking too many fags and drinking too much Scotch, stinking of Chanel Number 5. She makes me dance until 2am and then leaves me at dawn with the sense that I may never see her again.

But I couldn’t live with that unpredictability every day.

I think perhaps I need the slower work of words: the reading, the conversation, and the writing. The way your thoughts and feelings string themselves together slowly, finely and quietly until you know what land you’re standing on. The way you can wander other people’s lands and still find yourself in a version of home.

Words revisit you, reminding you of the lessons they’ve taught you long after they’ve been read or spoken. Like ghosts, sometimes. Words are less the glamorous, itinerant aunt who takes you on a night out than the mother and father who raise you.

And it’s often not just the story or the character or the sentence that lands, but the way it’s told. The musicality of a voice. An irreverence. A humour.

Reading a single funny article in the student newspaper changed my life when I was 19 years old. It led me to a tribe of funny friends I ended up working with for years, and then on to a man of words – a poet and screenwriter – whose voice was so musical and so funny I married him.

So what are these things? Because they aren’t just songs and books and articles. If they were they’d be sold next to the chocolate bars. They are more like lightning conductors for what you love about humanity.

And, like a lot of people, I do love a good laugh and a joke. The ones I love best are the ones that are long and don’t quite work, that are misremembered and told imperfectly. The ones that don’t even know how funny they are. I love the moments that are big enough to make me cry happy tears, and I don’t mind the wild ride of sad ones either, though I can only say that once I’m safely back on shore. And if you choose to tell me the saddest thing in your heart, I’d be honoured to hear it. I’d be honoured to hear you mess up a joke and to cry and sing – and more than that, I’d be honoured to hear you sing flat.

Long may we sing flat in fields with filthy feet, family and friends.