Pop culture gets grief all wrong, comedian Patton Oswalt told NPR in an interview Friday reflecting on the unexpected death of his wife, Michelle McNamara. When heroes of the silver screen experience a tragic loss, it "leads them to travel the world learning martial arts and doing CrossFit and getting really cut," he said, but in real life, it doesn't usually work that way:
When you lose someone, you tend to eat Wheat Thins for breakfast and rewatch The Princess Bride about 80 times and not sleep all that well. So my — I don't know when the push-ups are going to show up in my grieving process.But I just think like if Bruce Wayne — Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down in front of him when he was 9. And he travels the world and becomes this amazing hand-to-hand [fighter] — that's ridiculous. He would have grown up to have been Gotham City's most annoying slam poet. That's what Bruce Wayne would have been. [Oswalt, via NPR]
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