Learning To Live and Laugh

When people we love meet their ends through chronic illnesses or sudden accidents, we find a way amid the misery to accept the circumstances – circumstances that were out of our hands. But what do we do when it is in our hands? When we get to choose between our sufferance and someone else's?

Taken in by the colourful cover and the sweet-sounding title, I'd started on Jojo Moyes' Me Before You expecting a fun, light read. It was both; but it was so much more. 

Louisa Clark had loved her job making tea at the Buttered Bun. She'd loved the intimacy of it – the way it let her serve not customers but people, each with their own stories. When the teashop closes, she is left realising how unqualified she is for most kinds of work and how much her family needs her to earn a living. 

Traumatising odd-jobs and a hilariously stressful interview later, Lou finds herself as the caregiver of quadriplegic Will Traynor. Young, independent and successful Will (imagine Tom Cruise for best results, I did) had loved living his life at break-neck speed until the bike accident that damaged his spinal cord left him dependant on, and resentful towards, everyone around him. What follows is a string of amusing events through which Lou tries her hardest to bring back some of the colour lost from Will's life. In a way reminiscent of Jane and Rochester or Belle and her Beast, Me Before You is yet another portrayal of how compassion manages to crack through the hardest of shells. 

But Jojo Moyes didn't shy away from showing us the not-so-pretty sides of such a love story. There is nothing romantic about cleaning up someone's sick and sweat, nothing heroic about not being able to touch the woman you love. As the story progresses, we're made to witness how excruciating life can get for accident victims and their close ones. Eventually, Lou and Will find out how the closest bonds are formed from sharing laughter and misery, and taking care of each other. Towards the end, however, the book pushes both its characters and its readers to answer some painfully difficult questions – how much we can ask of our close ones in the name of love and how far we can go to absolve them of pain. 

Despite the sheer amount of pain it brings to life, this isn't a book about tragic accidents. It's a story of how two people who shouldn't have met learn of new ways to live life from each other's experiences, despite all odds; a story of the "adventures they had, the places they had gone" and of "electric skies and iridescent seas and evenings full of laughter and silly jokes". As much as it made my heart ache, reading Me Before You made me want to live, and live well.

Sarah Anjum Bari is a ravisher of caffeine and prose, with a heart that lives in Parisian cafes. Reality checks to be sent in at s.anjumbari@gmail.com