You've heard of fan fiction and slash fiction, right?

If not, we'll fill you in: fan fiction is a popular genre in which diehard fans of movies, books, and television series expand their favorite narratives by writing or re-writing stories that take place in those universes. In slash fiction, fans pair up characters for sexy times that they never get to experience in the originals—just think of characters like Kirk and Spock, Dean and Castiel, and Xena and Gabrielle.

Sounds like a lot of fun, right? So, what if we told you that Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning, and Stonewall Book Award–winning novel The Hours is basically a novel-length piece of slash and fan fiction that pays homage to the work of Virginia Woolf?

It's no joke. The Hours started out as an attempt to write a contemporary version of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway (source), and even though our man Cunningham's novel eventually evolved to include structures and narratives that are all its own, it's still easy to see the traces of Cunningham's original intentions.

The Hours has three parallel plotlines that occasionally intersect. In one of them, Virginia Woolf is drafting the novel that will eventually become Mrs. Dalloway; in another, a suburban housewife living in Los Angeles in the late 1940s is reading Mrs. Dalloway; and, in another, an urban socialite living in New York City at "the end of the twentieth century" (1.2) is living a contemporary version of Mrs. Dalloway.

If you've read Mrs. Dalloway, you'll see familiar personalities pop up in Cunningham's late twentieth-century narrative, but some of Woolf's original character pairings have been "slashed." Whereas Woolf's heroine settles down in a socially acceptable heterosexual marriage despite having once been in love with a girl, Cunningham's contemporary Mrs. Dalloway does no such thing. LGBT characters are out and proud in The Hours, and, unlike Woolf's original, The Hours doesn't put a lid on its gay and lesbian themes.

Like Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours tackles some heavy questions. At heart, the novel is about life, death, and the kinds of courage and strength that it sometimes takes just to go on living. Depression, despair, and thoughts of suicide take their tolls on characters' lives, and yet, through it all, the novel affirms the beauty and value of life.

"I am sentimental and optimistic," Cunningham says, "and I certainly feel that if you are an essentially sentimental and optimistic individual, your optimism is only going to feel even remotely valid if it can survive the worst that can possibly happen to people" (source).

Like Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours explores the tragedy, hardship, and suffering that life can bring, but it sets them in contrast with optimism, joy, and light. The result is a book that, like Woolf's own, attempts to cut straight to the heart of our extraordinary, inevitably mortal existence.

Not bad for high-brow fanfic, right?

When The Hours took off, its success created a new wave of interest in Mrs. Dalloway, inspiring book club members and university professors alike to put both books on the docket (source).

But we know you, Shmoopers. We know you aren't interested in evanescent things like popular approval, cultural influence, or critical acclaim. You didn't go see The Force Awakens just because everyone else was raving about it, and you sure as sunrise don't watch Titanic for its Oscar-winning art direction, either. What you want to know is if The Hours will speak to your soul.

Okay, maybe that's not what you were going to ask about, but whatever. Either way, no worries because unless you're a heartless automaton, the chances are good that book is gonna wreck you.

The Hours is a novel that tackles joy, sorrow, physical suffering, mental illness, and tenacious hope head on. Many of its major characters struggle with illness, despair, and thoughts of suicide. Some of them choose to die, and others choose to live. Whether or not you feel that you can identify with any of its three protagonists, the novel's deeper questions about the meaning and value of human life can strike a chord within us all.

Michael Cunningham has spoken publicly about his personal struggles with depression, and when he talks about novelists' "doomed, collective effort to write the entire story of the whole world and everything and everyone in it," he says that "the whole notion of sort of facing down hopelessness and having the courage to live is simply one of the things that I feel I can bring" (source).

Although The Hours may seem like a melancholy, downright depressing book at times, at its core it affirms the value of all human life. If that doesn't hit you right in the feelings, we don't know what will.