This is, of course, the central question that sick lit begs: What is it that all of us, children and adults, get out of these harrowing tales? Are we using them to grapple with our own mortality? Is it a form of healthy catharsis? Or are we all just a bunch of sickos getting our kicks? Personally, I think it's mostly the latter, and no one wants to admit it. As journalist Michelle Slatalla wrote of sick lit in 2009, "...today’s tear-jerkers are a new example of an age-old fascination with other people’s problems, the modern equivalent of going to the opera to see a tortured Tosca leap to her death from the Castel Sant’ Angelo." Sick lit pushes the most painful emotional buttons in our brains without actually forcing us to experience the much, much greater pain of living the reality. Horror movies and haunted houses do the same thing, letting us have a tiny taste of sheer terror though we know the whole time that we're safe. Pain, like pleasure, provides an endorphin rush, and humans have been using entertainment to chase that high for thousands of years. In the fifth century, we wept at Greek tragedies. Today, we've got Netflix and Grey's Anatomy