How do you cry and laugh at the same time?

You read Dave Eggers.
Here's an excerpt from what I'm reading right now (thanks for the quote idea Matt) in A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius:

But six moths later she began to have pain again -- Was it indigestion? It could just be indigestion, of course, the burping and the pain, the leaning over the kitchen table at dinner; people have indigestion; people take Tums; Hey Mom, should I get you some Tums? -- but when she went in again and they had "opened her up" -- a phrase they used -- and had looked inside, it was staring out at them, at the doctors, like a thousand writhing worms under a rock, swarming, shimmering, wet and oily -- Good God! -- or maybe not like worms but like a million little podules, each a tiny city of cancer, each with an unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever. When the doctors opened her up, and there was suddenly light thrown upon the world of cancer-podules, they were annoyed by the disturbance, and defiant. Turn off. The fucking. Light. They glared at the doctor, each podule, though a city onto itself, having one single eye, one blind evil eye in the middle, which stared imperiously, as only a blind eye can do, out at the doctor. Go. The. Fuck. Away. The doctors did what they could, took the whole stomach out, connected what was left, this part to that, and sewed her back up, leaving the city as is, the colonist to their manifest destiny, their fossil fuels, their strip malls and suburban sprawl, and replaced the stomach with tube and a portable external IV bag. It's kind of cute, the IV bag. She use to carry it with her, in a gray back-pack -- it's futuristic-looking, like a synthetic ice pack crossed with this liquid food pouches engineered for space travel. We have a name for it, we call it "the bag."