I was about 3 books from the end of War and Peace, talking to my mother.
“I’m really enjoying the book,” I told her. “I think it’s funny that with every chapter Pierre gets more and more plump.”
“Has he married Natasha yet?” she asked.
A few moths later I was talking to a friend’s mom about Daniel Deronda. I was about half-way through, and summarized the plot so far.
“Oh,” the mom said, “so he hasn’t found out he’s Jewish yet?”
Livid, I read to the end of the book. Where did he find out he was Jewish? About twenty pages from the end.
What the hell. Do mothers get off spoiling books for me?
My wife loves to read the last pages of a book before she reads the middle, loves movie reviews with spoilers, etc.
I remember seeing Carlito’s Way with her. In the opening scene, Carlito is shot, and the rest of the movie is a flashback. From the way he’s shot, it’s not clear if he’s fatally wounded or not (he’s still talking, IIRC and looking not TOO bad after the shooting). My wife promptly spoils it by telling me that he died (she’d read a review or something).
I was having dinner at my mom’s house one time, and she was urging me to go see Million Dollar Baby. In the midst of her raving, she said "it’s not really what you expect though, see, at the end, he has to decide whether to euthanize her or not because she’s paralyzed.
And then I was sitting in on my Dad’s screenwriting course, and he showed a clip from near the beginning of Chinatown, and in the middle of his completely unrelated spiel, he said “she’s not really his daughter, she’s an actress playing his daughter.”
I was at a church social right after the last Harry Potter book came out where they killed off a main character. I humiliated myself and my family by scowling at one of the freaking church ladies who coudln’t resist spoiling the book. I expect more from church ladies.
We were taking my 4 year old daughter to a Christmas play and we had one of her friends in the car. My wife and I had just started attending Catholic church that year and my daughter was enjoying a mild surge of curiousity about Jesus. We played up the idea that Christmas was baby Jesus’ birthday and got a little nativty scene for the house. From the back seat, I hear my daughter start humming a little Christian tune, “Jesus Loves Me.”
Then I hear her little friend says, “Jesus? He’s dead. The stuck pins in his feet and hands and killed him.”
Horrified I look over to my wife and see she is looking back at me with the same astonished expresion. From the back seat, my daughter, her voice rising three octaves, says, “Dadddddyyyyyy?”
It was very fucked up.
Trying not to appear too angry with her little friend, I said, “We were just getting to that part, sweetie. I promise.” You don’t realize how ridiculious the whole Christian thing sounds until you try to explain it to a semi-hysterical four year old. “But the good news is, he rises from the dead three days later. No, really. It’s called Easter. And there’s this bunny. And you get lots of candy and stuff.”
Also, when I was in about 5th grade my mom went through this phase of reading really crappy pulp romance novels. I was already a book snob by that point and I was appalled my mom would read stuff that was written for idiots. So I read the last chapter of every book she brought home and told her the endings, thus “ruining” the books for her. How one can ruin crap is sort of a metaphysical question though, isn’t it?
Anyhow, my rampant spoilerism made her give the books up. Or maybe she just hid them better. Because she watched that stupid Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman show whenever I was home from school…
Something about that little story brings out the worst in people (although nothing in this thread offends me).
I told this story at work and my office-mate almost choked on his breakfast to practically yell, “IT’S ALL A FUCKING LIE,” meaning, I guess, that he didn’t buy any of the Christian stuff.
I was shocked! You understand we all have their own personal belief systems, but until something like this happens you don’t realize just how neurotic some people are.
