“Life is hard, and children have to be told how hard life can be…So they will be sympathetic to others. So they will understand that some people have it harder than they do and that a trip through this world can be a wildly different experience, depending on what chemicals are raging through one’s mind.”
I still haven’t seen the movie yet, but I borrowed The Silver Linings Playbook from my sister and liked it enough to want to watch it on film. It’s a quick read, but kind of a sad one. The quote above is basically the moral of the novel. But since the story is told from the perspective of a man who firmly believes in silver linings, it’s extra hard to watch him learn that lesson.
Pat has been in a mental hospital for an undetermined amount of time before his mother brings him home, against the advice of his doctors and the wishes of her (asshole) husband. Pat landed in the “bad place” after an incident with his wife, but he strongly believes that God wants him to improve himself (work out more, read more, quit watching movies) so that his “apart time” with his wife will end.
Pat looks for the silver linings in things, and tries to maintain a positive perspective, which is noble but difficult in light of all of his problems, which he mostly refuses to recognize. He meets a woman named Tiffany, who is her own brand of strange, and becomes reabsorbed into the world of Eagles football. There’s some debate as to whether those things are good for him. He works out almost constantly, is ignored by his father and rarely takes his pills. He iReading the book (which is basically his diary) gives the reader an interesting look into the mind of a man whose chemicals just can’t seem to balance themselves out.
Cannonball Read V 