Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly felt that "Misery" is "probably Billie Joe's idea of a Brecht-Weill pop operetta".
Sometimes he sets off in his car, but never completes the 20-minute journey to campus: "While driving, I go into this state where I feel that the misery in my head is a physical thing," he says.
"I mean I should feel different but even now I still feel that I can't celebrate when my mother and I were in such misery.
I describe the pain as living with misery … it makes you feel miserable … makes you feel that if this is all … it is for the rest of your life … and I have always been a really independent person and now I've got to be dependent on someone else … and that's been killing me (Mary, 72 years).
In New York, Barbara Grufferman's book The Best of Everything After 50, published in 2010, tapped into a wellspring of misery among women who felt that, at 50, frumpy irrelevance beckoned.
"This original work makes us deeply feel one form that misery has taken".
Every time I touched the handle of that jug, I would remember those days when I first felt the misery that was to turn me in on myself, leaving my mother to watch me in silence at dinner, her eyes filled half with sadness, half with reproach.
As his "I Am No Good at Love" puts it: For I feel the misery of the end In the moment that it begins, And the bitterness of the last goodbye Is the bitterness that wins.
I feel that burden and beg Allah to forgive me and help Kashmir out of its misery".
To the consoling argument that "misery is a school for the soul" and a necessary immersion for the would-be artist he counters, "Misery does not feel like a purifying bath.
