Real Life, lost his father just a few weeks ago — so why isn’t he crying? The promise of grief is unpredictability, and yet, Taylor says on the LGBTQ&A podcast this week, people still expect you to behave in a very specific way.“It’s not that I wrote this book to grind an ax, but one of the axes I was happy to grind when writing this book was to sort of bust open a lot of the polite myths around things like grieving,” he says.There’s a set of prescribed behaviors that society expects. “As a rule, it should be neat, it should be sprawling, it should be messy.
Your life should be ruined, but in this really constrained way so that when I comfort you, I can feel good about comforting you.