I recall a friend telling me how much she enjoyed young adult books because their themes are usually happy and good, whereas adult literature often turns to the heavy and the miserable.
Somewhere I heard a line that 'heavy is easy, light is difficult.'
It is easier to slip into dark emotions that it is to accept and overcome them, to grow from them and refuse to let them drag you down. Don't we know people who bring us down with their despair? At this point in my life, I can't read any more Dostoyevsky after Crime and Punishment.
Madeleine L'Engle says 'I don't like hopeless books. Books that make you think, 'Ah, life's not worth living.' I want to leave them [the readers] thinking yea, this endeavour is difficult, but it is worth it, and it is ultimately joyful.'
There are some authors I am drawn to for their lightness. In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl does not gloss over the worst parts of the Nazi concentration camp experience, but he shows us that even there, he was able to find remnants of love and beauty, while leaving aside much of his own suffering.
From some authors' words, you might never pick up on a dark side of their lives. It is only after a perusal through Wikipedia's clinical facts that you learn that Lucy Maud Montgomery did not write in the last few years of her life when she was living through depression. David Foster Wallace committed suicide at the age of 46. This is the writer who instilled in me a love for linguistics simply because there is a sense in his writing of how much he loved linguistics.
Those among us who appear to have light, bright lives inevitably have a corresponding dark side. Those who have the capacity to feel the most, feel on both ends of the extreme. There is true courage in walking into the heart of each moment and letting it cut into you.
I think it's a remarkably selfless human spirit that imbues those who keep their ugliest demons out of their words. They share the lightest and brightest with us while they shield us from the dark; so that we can be lifted up, to brilliant places we could not go by ourselves, while they take on the burden of living solitarily through the rest.