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Why The Giving Tree Makes You Cry
Like many parents before me, I sob whenever I read this book to my kid
The other night, my four-year-old son approached me with Shel Silverstein’s classic picture book The Giving Tree. I didn’t even know we had a copy, but I certainly recalled the book from childhood.
I began reading aloud, and, a third of the way in, the book ambushed me: I choked up, teetering on the verge of outright weeping. Certain phrases wrenched me inside. I could barely get through the book, needing to stop several times to gather myself (while pretending to admire the illustrations, of course). It was an intense, ineffable feeling: not quite sadness, certainly not joy, but not even nostalgia — something deeper.
A Google search revealed that adults commonly cry when reading The Giving Tree aloud, and they’re often not entirely sure why. Chrissy Teigen, always newsworthy, once tweeted about her emotional reaction to the book:
And this fellow on reddit shared a similar experience:
At face value, the story is about a tree’s sacrifice for the love of a boy. At first, they happily play together every day, but eventually the boy grows up and pursues the trappings of adulthood: money, a house, a family, travel. So the tree gives the boy her apples to sell, her branches to build a house, and her trunk to make a boat. By the end, the tree is a stump, but the boy — now a tired old man — needs nothing more than a quiet place to rest, so he sits on the tree and the tree is happy. The end.
