I learn that I am the kind of asshole to diss a story where a man loses the woman he loves to cancer: "Do I Look Sick to You?" by C.J Hribal

Last week, I mentioned that I still don't know if I think the movie A Star is Born was a great movie or just an okay movie with two great performances from Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. I definitely was into the scenes where Lady Gaga was becoming a star, especially her debut performance on stage with Cooper. It's very easy to root for the two main characters. In theory, this should also make it easy to feel sad when Cooper commits suicide. (Oh yeah, spoilers.) But I just wasn't quite sure. The film's makers said all the right things about this being meant to bring attention to mental illness, but I couldn't quite escape the feeling that part of what the movie did was quasi-cynically capitalize on feelings of pity for a romantic and tragic suicide victim. It even had the added Byronic touch of him killing himself out of mistaken self-sacrifice. The point was to give us the big moment with Lady Gaga onstage and the audience crying and, in a perverse sense, enjoying its sadness.

I was similarly split while reading "Do I Look Sick to You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)" by C.J. Hribal. We've got a spunky cancer patient everyone at the hospital loves. The narrator loves her, too. Everyone is sure "she is going to kick cancer in the ass." The moment I read that, I was certain she was going to die, and it was going to be an attempted tear-jerker. 

It's a sad cancer story. Taking the general idea of death from cancer and making it concrete through the repeated attempts to make love was a good, old, college try at shaking the cliche from the formula, but ultimately, it's a cancer story. I felt something, because I'm not really that empty a husk of a human being with a stapler where my heart should be. I just didn't feel all that much. It's a really difficult story to drain pathos from, because the sad terminal cancer patient story has been done. I admire Hribal for coming close, much as admire the performances Cooper and Lady Gaga gave in a well-worn story. But that doesn't change what the story is. 

Maybe I just instinctively resist it when I know a story is trying to make me cry. Maybe I'm the problem here. Yeah, let's go with that. Assuming the problem is me is an algorithm that hardly ever fails. It's a perennial classic. Just like stories about dying cancer patients.