Sometimes I’m not a great sister-in-law.

My husband’s brother, a theater professor, published a book last year – Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater. The book is academic, yet it’s written so that a general audience can understand and follow.

We got the book as soon as it came out, and I began reading it immediately. And a little less than halfway in, I stopped.

A lot played into my stopping. The book is fascinating – it wasn’t boredom that stopped me. It is extremely well-written – the writing kept a hold of me. So why did I put the book down?

I put it down partway into the chapter that warned about spoilers. Many of the plays he discusses have twists and surprises that the author explores. I read through the section that included the play I had already seen (Deathtrap), and then paused my reading with a potential intent to read the other plays about which he would be speaking. Then I would return and finish the book.

But I knew I wouldn’t read those plays. Reading a play, at least to me, is nowhere near as good as watching it performed. And these are not plays that I will find produced locally.

Reading through the book would be an admission that I was not going to watch the plays. It would be a symbolic closing of a door onto the possibility of seeing those productions without knowing how they ended. It would cut off possibilities. And I don’t like cutting off possibilities.

But again, I knew I was unlikely to see the plays. And even if I did see any of them at some point, there is a very strong likelihood that I would not remember the plot twist or surprise ending I read about, since I generally can’t remember where I put my keys and I call my sons by the wrong name about 40% of the time. Truth is, the “spoiler alert break” allowed me to stop reading something painful to me.

Murder Most Queer is not a literary critique. It is an analysis within the context of sociology, exploring homophobic paradigms within our society. As I read the analyses, as I learned the histories, as I learned about the writers, performers, and audience members, I felt saddened and sickened by the forces behind the murders in the stories. I felt saddened and sickened by the outcasting of those that don’t fit into an accepted norm. It didn’t allow me my everyday denial of ickiness and my naïve and insulated little world of tolerance and acceptance. It made me uncomfortable. FYI, the book is not a downer – I just read into things. I don’t want to think about people I deeply love feeling like they are villainized or ostracized because of their sexual orientation. I want to think that era is close to over. I don’t want to think about societal disdain translating into self-hatred.

So I jumped on the excuse of not wanting to ruin the endings of plays I knew I would likely never see.

By doing this, I denied my brother-in-law the decency of a “hey, I finished your book – it’s amazing!” phone call. Which is really a big thing. Writing a book is no easy task, let alone the process of publishing. Even when academic, it is an emotional process. And reflecting on a society that can be so filled with hate is difficult, even when the plays themselves many times are simply fun and cathartic. He knew I had started the book (since I had happily told him about how much I was loving it when it first arrived), so what was he to think of never getting that “closure” call? Hopefully he chalked it up to my being a theatrically uncultured boob and not to my not liking his work.

My colleagues and I frequently marvel at the denial of some of our patients and their families. People ignore symptoms. They ignore risks. They ignore prognoses and likely outcomes. They avoid what is not easy or what makes them uncomfortable, and by doing so put themselves in positions not to be healthy or not to get the most out of their lives. Rather than confronting the discomfort or the fear, they hide and end up missing out – on health, on time, on quality of life.

This week, I picked up the book again. I finished it this evening – just in time to be able to say, when my brother-in-law walks in the door tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with us, “Hey, I finished your book – it’s amazing!” There are storylines I’ve learned, shows I want to see, writers and actors I want to Google and YouTube, and ideas I want to discuss.

To my husband’s brother – thank you for, as always, educating me and opening my eyes. I apologize for being a lousy sister-in-law, and I hope that dinner on Thursday will help make up for it a bit.