How effectively can we ever really know one other particular person? The distinctive first memoir from novelist Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew, explores this query in a means that’s concurrently sharp-edged and loving, sincere and painfully haunting.
Wallace’s honed prose and hypnotic pacing carry readers by way of a layered narrative intertwining the creator’s life with these of his pal and brother-in-law William Nealy, his sister Holly and, tangentially, William’s finest pal, Edgar. The result’s an advanced story of love and loathing and, finally, Wallace’s advanced deconstruction of his friendship with William after he died by suicide.
Daniel Wallace shares extra about his discovery that writing a memoir is “very, very, very hard.”
A gifted cartoonist, illustrator, whitewater adventurer and author, William was a lodestar for Wallace. Their first encounter was throughout a pool social gathering at Wallace’s childhood house. William was Holly’s 18-year-old boyfriend on the time, and he was perched on their roof, calculating the gap to the swimming pool under. Eventually he jumped by way of the air, landed within the water, made an enormous splash and climbed again onto the roof to do it once more. From that second, the 12-year-old Wallace was “spellbound” by William’s “wildness, the derring-do, his willingness to take flight—literally—into the unknown. . . . He flew, and I, who couldn’t, just watched.”
Over time, Wallace’s relationship with William took root and grew—as a task mannequin, pal, brother-in-law and inventive inspiration. “He showed me how it was done: experience, imagine, then create,” Wallace writes. There had been highway journeys throughout state borders toting unlawful medicine, fishing expeditions, raucous rock concert events and different chaotic adventures. Though he was outwardly charismatic, ingenious and Clint Eastwood-style macho, William was additionally Holly’s delicate and devoted husband, changing into her caretaker as her rheumatoid arthritis worsened.
“But there were two Williams,” Wallace writes. “One was . . . the William we all knew. There was another we didn’t know . . . the William who lived in his own secret room, the narrow confines of an interior life with space for only one, and a much darker space than I’d ever imagined it would be.” It was not till effectively after William’s tragic loss of life by suicide at age 48 that Wallace found a fuller image of what each drove and tormented William. As Wallace moved by way of his anger at discovering a model of William he’d by no means identified whereas William was alive, he regularly realized that even in the event you can’t absolutely know one other human being, there may be at the least the chance you can, by way of kindness and self-compassion, know a measure of your self.
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