Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Land’ Is a Joyful Tearjerker
Last fall, while leaving a critic’s screening of the film Hamnet, I was confronted just outside the door by the production company’s chirpy PR handler. “How was it?” she asked, as if the rivers of mascara streaming down my cheeks weren’t a clear enough signal. “Oh God,” I blurted out, before turning heel toward the bathroom. How to properly describe the garment-rending despair I’d felt in those 125 minutes? I had known what I was in for. The Maggie O’Farrell novel on which the movie was based had left me in a similar state both times I’d read it. The allure of the literary tearjerker wasn’t new to me either. When I was about 12 and my older sister recalled sobbing in front of her college library over Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, I raced to read it. (I was not deterred when my mother fretted about its “dead babies and dead dreams.”) I wanted the raw emotion, and the release, that my sister had reported. And I would seek it out again and again: …
