Thank Algonquin Books, #partner for the finished copy of This Isn’t Going to End Well in exchange for my honest review. I borrowed the audiobook from the library.
Publisher: Algonquin Books / Hachette Audio
Published: March 26, 2024 – Paperback Release
Summary:
In this powerful memoir, the bestselling author of Big Fish tries to come to terms with the life and death of his multi-talented longtime friend and brother-in-law, who had been his biggest hero and inspiration, in a poignant, lyrical, and moving memoir.
If we’re lucky, we all encounter at least one person whose life elevates and inspires our own. For acclaimed novelist Daniel Wallace, he had one hero and inspiration for so much of what his longtime friend and brother-in-law William Nealy. Seemingly perfect, impossibly cool, William was James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and MacGyver all rolled into one, an acclaimed outdoorsman, a famous cartoonist, an accomplished author, a master of all he undertook, William was the ideal that Daniel sought to emulate.
But when William took his own life at age 48, Daniel was left first grieving, and then furious with the man who broke his and his sister’s hearts. That anger led him to commit a grievous act of his own, a betrayal that took him down a dark path into the tortured recesses of William’s past. Eventually, a new picture of William emerged, of a man with too many secrets and too much shame to bear.
This Isn’t Going to End Well is Daniel Wallace’s first foray into nonfiction. Part love story, part true crime, part a desperate search for the self and how little we really can know another, This Isn’t Going to End Well tells an intimate and moving story of what happens when we realize our heroes are human.
My thoughts:
I love picking up memoirs because I always find it interesting to walk in someone else’s life for just a bit. They tend to be quite powerful and sometimes enlightening and that is exactly what we have here with Daniel Wallace’s memoir.
This memoir is as much about grief as it is finding out just how little we really know those around us. It is an introspective look at a friendship that ultimately leads to understanding all that came to be. The book takes you on a roller coaster of emotions and at times feels like you are intruding on something quite personal.
This might not be an easy read, but the prose pulls you in and keeps you engaged throughout. There are moments of humor interspersed with the dark, keeping it from being too heavy at any one point.
Audio thoughts:
While this memoir is not narrated by the author himself, I still went the audio route and thought the narrator, Michael Crouch, did a great job. His pacing was spot on and he wasn’t overly emotional. It was done just right.
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