When I was younger, I wrote stories with sad endings. Maybe just because I was a moody teen, I was drawn to tragedies, sad songs, sad movies…novels like Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary, music by the Doors and Janis Ian, films like Chimes at Midnight and Lawrence of Arabia.

Later on, I added in the relevant signifiers of liberal angst…They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Midnight Cowboy… and epic sagas of emptiness and loss like Moby Dick and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

All of which is to say I was more goth chick than cheerleader, more drama queen than teeny bopper. Which is all well and good. Most writers should cut their teeth on sad stories. We feel sadness so deeply when we’re young, it’s like we’re the first ones to discover it. Sadness makes us think, makes us wrestle with the eternal Whys and Why nots.

And also quite frankly, sadness is easier. You can kill off your main character and that’s that. A guaranteed tearjerker. Depict an ambiguous fate and you have to be as talented as Cheever or Updike. Depict happiness, and you risk appearing saccharine.

And your character’s triumphs have to be earned. Whereas when you can’t think what else to do, having your hero get hit by a bus at least lets you finish the damn thing.

Only after a while, I started to feel the need for a little relief.

The first book I wrote that actually has a happy ending is Slavery, probably my darkest and most wrenching novel, and that’s just because I knew I had to get the characters to a good place (New Orleans) or else I couldn’t stand it.

I’d have ended up killing myself, and not just them.

It took me a long time to learn to write comedy. Some people are just naturally funny, but when I finally learned how to write books that actually made me laugh, it felt like a new lease on life. Goddamn it, I thought, this doesn’t just have to be hard work! This can actually be fun!

I wrote the Saturni series with a feeling of euphoria, and I think that’s why I’m enjoying promoting them now. Even though they’re full of horror and suspense and kink and a soupcon of moral philosophy, they’re funny, and more importantly they’re hopeful.

Naturally, of course, life doesn’t just leave you in one place. After finishing the Saturni, my husband died, and while I’m not going to go into details right now (that’s for another essay, or another book), I ended up writing like a possessed woman, because it was the only thing that made me remotely happy.

I wrote seven books in four and a half years…and actually, they’re not half bad. But finally I had to slow down and get the Saturni books published, and then I started revising some earlier works that still didn’t entirely please me.

The revelation here, thank God, was that their quality was pretty high, and what needed fixing weren’t the scenes of heartbreak and suffering and excitement and grandeur, but the tone and turns of phrase that put the stories into focus. In a nutshell, when I wrote those books, I hadn’t felt the freedom to say what I meant, so the nuances of motive and feeling in my characters had been blurred. Now, I could simply see and say what they longed for, even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves.

That gave those earlier works the clarity and power they’d previously lacked, and I have to say, I’m pleased with the results.

But goddamn it was hard! To plunge back into tragedy now, when there’s so much sorrow in the world and so much accumulated grief in my own life, was excruciating, and it didn’t leave me unscarred. Don’t get me wrong, it was own choice to do the work, and I did it, but it made me realize how much sheer stubbornness it requires to be happy.

We so easily descend, but rising (out of the earth, out of the tomb, out of despair) is tough, and requires intense focus.

So today I’m forcing myself to look at all the new green leaves on the trees and all the life and beauty that surrounds me and not remind myself that tomorrow is my husband’s birthday (although of course I’ll remember it), but instead to see joy.

To see happy endings. To see things that are funny. To see things that are triumphant. To see things that are, if not wise and true, at least interesting and intriguing enough to make me go on. I want to take another step. I want to live.

Because tragedy is finally too easy. Comedy is hard. But as Lenny Bruce said, laughter is the only honest art form.

XXX,

Adrienne V. Parks