When I was 38 years old, a doctor told me my brain was unusually big. It wasn’t a good thing. The previous year, I had experienced an ocular migraine, which is when you suffer the visual effects of a migraine, without the pain. My GP referred me for an MRI just to rule out any other causes, which it did.
But the MRI revealed something else totally unrelated. It showed that I had been born with a Chiari malformation, a congenital neurological condition that, to massively oversimplify, means the tissue of my brain extends near the top of my spinal cord. It’s a relatively common condition and most people who have it never display any symptoms; many, like me, discover it by chance. But it can cause a build-up of spinal fluid in the skull or in the spinal cord, and that can be very serious indeed. And there was a tiny build-up in my spinal cord.
As the neurosurgeon listed the potential symptoms I should look out for in the future, I felt my panic rise. They ranged from blinding headaches to a feeling of weakness in the arms and legs; if left untreated they could lead to permanent disability or (in very rare cases) death. I got so upset the doctor eventually said, “Look, I can see you’re not taking this in. Come back in a week and bring someone with you.” His manner was brusque, but it was a very kind thing to do.
The following week was very, very bad. It wasn’t just that I had been told there was literally something wrong with my brain. It was the conviction that this malformation might strike me down at any minute. I made the mistake of googling Chiari Malformation and found hundreds of posts by uninsured Americans who had been experiencing debilitating symptoms for decades without treatment, and were now suffering horribly. Even if I never developed these symptoms myself, I felt like I was going to live in terror of them every minute for the rest of my life. I would never be able to relax again.
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Before that day, I had been reading a very serious book about refugees in the second World War. After I came home, I couldn’t pick it up. For the rest of that awful week, the only thing that could stop me worrying was reading the Moomin books by the Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson. I would curl up in bed and immerse myself in Jansson’s funny, strange, wise world. Even though these books were about strange creatures living in a mysterious valley, there was something very sensible and practical and calm about them. They made me feel as if everything would be okay. I don’t think I could have got through that week without them.
I went back to the neurosurgeon, taking my husband this time, and I managed to listen to him as he explained that the odds of anything bad happening to me at my age were small and that I would be regularly monitored and treated if necessary. Luckily, I haven’t developed any symptoms since then, but that diagnosis taught me a few things. It taught me to never google any medical condition ever again. It taught me that living in a state of constant terror is actually impossible if you’re not actively in physical danger. And it taught me just how effective a comforting story can be at a scary, weird time.
From tales told around a fire to Netflix binges, human beings have always turned to stories to bring comfort and cheer. But a creative work’s capacity to create happiness has not, traditionally, been taken very seriously. There can be an assumption that anything that’s fun or joyful must be simplistic or childish, easily created and utterly disposable.
“I have never understood the contempt for joy, particularly in the arts and academia,” says Paige Reynolds, an academic at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts who curated the exhibition Happy Ever After: Falling in Love with Irish Romance Fiction at MoLI in Dublin last year. “Why do we think that only sad people can be smart, only grumpy people have the capacity for discrimination? Seeking out the temporary pleasure offered by a book or film doesn’t make me dumb or naive, any more than being relentlessly critical makes me smart and politically efficacious.”
Reading or watching something comforting doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the grim realities of life
Reynolds had always been a fan of romance novels, but during the pandemic she found herself reading more of them than ever. “As a teacher and scholar of Irish literature, I spend a lot of time immersed in difficult books about depressing circumstances, which is work I enjoy and find deeply rewarding,” she says. “But I also appreciate the security of a happy ending in romance, of knowing that things will work out… I am deeply comforted by promises met, people being kind to each other, and expertise: good romance novels offer me all of that.”
The same can be said for comfort television and film. My new novel Love Scene is a romantic comedy, but it’s also my love letter to comfort TV and the people who make it. It’s the story of Annie McDermott, who is offered what she thinks is her dream job, writing for an iconic Irish soap opera. She finds herself sharing an office with her arrogant college nemesis Art Sullivan, who’s always looked down on popular entertainment. But golden boy Art, who seems to have sailed through life, doesn’t understand how much some people can need their comfort show. He doesn’t understand how TV can distract people from their troubles, just for an hour or two. How it can make them feel less alone.
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And reading or watching something comforting doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the grim realities of life. I spent the months leading up to the 2018 referendum on abortion knocking on doors and handing out leaflets, first every week and then, as the referendum drew closer, every day. The second series of The Handmaid’s Tale had just started airing, but after a few episodes I couldn’t watch it any more. Why would I watch a grim fictional series about women’s lack of rights when I was exhausting myself, both emotionally and physically, fighting for my own? Instead I watched Gotham, a preposterously camp Batman origin-story series, and read my way through Joan Aiken’s historical romance novels. I needed that comforting distraction in order to keep going with the important work.
This is something that has long been understood. The song Bread and Roses, based on a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim, has been a women workers’ anthem for over a century. “Hearts starve as well as bodies,” goes the second verse. “Give us bread, but give us roses.” Those roses can be the joy of a romance novel or a melodramatic TV series. “I firmly believe that pleasurable distraction does not necessarily quell the desire and ability to fight back against pernicious conditions,” says Reynolds. “Instead, it can give us a temporary vacation from distress, the space to imagine different paths, different futures.”
Of course, there are many forms of comforting art. “I’m struck by how, during hard times, different people seek out wildly different forms for comfort,” says Reynolds. “I have a husband [who’s] soothed by studying grammar books in a variety of languages, a friend who finds relief in violent horror books and films… I cannot fathom any of those activities as comforts. But I also get mocked at home for my choice of comfort music, which is super sad songs by Jason Isbell on repeat. To each her own.”
On the night my dad died suddenly, I kept thinking of the moment in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book A Little Princess when the young heroine hear the news of her father’s death. She doesn’t react with wailing and tears. She goes to her room and sits down and says, again and again, “My papa is dead. My papa is dead.” If she says it enough times, maybe it will eventually feel real. Some 120 years earlier, someone had captured exactly how I felt that night and put it in a children’s book. There was comfort in that too.
If my book makes people laugh and brings them some joy when they’re having a hard day, nothing would make me more proud
I don’t want or need to be comforted all the time. I’m glad to live in a world full of art that challenges me. I don’t want all the art I engage with to ignore the realities of the world. But in order to face those realities, sometimes I need a little comfort. Art Sullivan, the hero of Love Scene, is named after the eponymous hero of one of my favourite films, Preston Sturges’s 1941 classic Sullivan’s Travels. In the movie, Sullivan is a successful director of musical comedies who now wants to make a serious film that’s “a true canvas of the suffering of humanity” (“With a little sex in it?” says his producer hopefully). He sets out to research the grim reality of a Depression-era United States, and eventually finds himself wrongfully incarcerated in a brutal prison camp.
One night the men in the chain gang are taken to a film show hosted by the generous congregation of a black-community church. And as Sullivan watches both his fellow prisoners and their hosts laugh uproariously at a cartoon, he finally understands why art that brings happiness is important. When he’s eventually freed, he tells the studio he’s going to make a comedy. “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” says Sullivan in the film’s final scene. “Did you know that’s all some people have?” If my book makes people laugh and brings them some joy when they’re having a hard day, nothing would make me more proud. Nothing, in fact, would make me more happy.
Love Scene by Anna Carey is published by Hachette Ireland
