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Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via coral)
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On The Ending of WALU
Be there spoilers here? Oh yes, there be spoilers. Big, juicy, oily spoilers. So, for safety’s sake, here’s a Cezanne painting of fruit that will never spoil, because it’s in a painting. Read on at your own peril.
Welcome to the world below the painting of fruit. Gird your loins. Just like the child of a recently divorced couple experiencing his first two-household Christmas, you’re about to get spoiled.
If there’s one thing readers of WALU have had strong feelings about, it’s the ending. Sometimes those strong feelings are positive. Sometimes those strong feelings are negative. Sometimes those strong feelings are so negative they strip the paint off my apartment walls and reduce me to a sniveling ball in the corner of my now paintless apartment. But most often, the thing I hear from readers is very straightforward: “Tommy, what happens at the end of your book?! I must know or I shall go mad! MAD, I tell you. MAAAAAAD!”
It’s very generous, actually. My readers are assuming that if they didn’t understand what happened at the end of the book, it must be their fault. But the fault, dear Brutus, lies entirely with me.
Let’s start with the facts. WALU is the story of four teenagers who learn an asteroid has a 2/3 chance of colliding with the earth in about eight weeks. Beginning with this conceit, there are three plausible ways the book could end.
1) The Mega-Sad Ending
What happens: Everybody dies.
References: Melancholia, Dr. Strangelove, real life, and the “sad” ending of Wayne’s World.
Problem: There’s nothing inherently wrong with this type of ending, but you definitely couldn’t call it satisfying. Literary novels revel in uber-depression (just see the nonstop sobfest that was “A Little Life,” which won the National Book Award and The Booker Prize, and which I found completely underwhelming and laughably unrealistic). I didn’t want to go that route with WALU. We’ve come to care about these kids over the last few hundred pages; the last thing we want is to watch them all get smooshed by a big rock.
2) The Mega-Happy Ending
What happens: Nobody dies.
References: Any Disney movie except for Bambi and The Lion King. Anything Reese Witherspoon has ever been in, probably.
Problem: I think this is the ending that a lot of my readers expect, because so much non-literary fiction usually supplies it. One of the things that fans of George R. R. Martin love so much is his willingness to kill off major characters; that’s because it’s still rare for novelists to have the chutzpah to kill their babies. The Harry Potter books never kill off anyone important other than Dumbledore (who’s already a million years old, and it’s near the end of the series). The Hunger Games trilogy, which is all about death, also spares all of its protagonists (nobody cares about you, Pru). For better or worse (I think worse, personally), people don’t expect the characters they love to die, which is why readers really expected me to go with the mega-happy ending. But it’s the worst kind of deus ex machina, for the characters to just “be saved” at the end. See that passive construction? BE saved. You want your characters to save themselves, not BE saved. This ending would be dramatically sterile.
3) The Ambiguous Ending
What happens: Who knows?
References: Gone Girl. Blade Runner. Anything by David Lynch. This list of references, maybe…
Problem: We all want to know everything all the time always.
As anyone who’s read WALU can tell you, I went with the third option. I knew this would be the ending before I wrote a single word of the book, because it was obvious to me that the other two options would never work. Besides, I’m a huge fan of ambiguity, because life is ambiguous. We don’t know when we’ll die, or how. We don’t know what happens afterwards. We don’t know how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. Life is all about uncertainties and ambiguities, so why shouldn’t our literature embrace that?
I’m going to admit something to you: I despise the endings to Harry Potter and the Hunger Games. Why? Because both insist on certainty. Harry is MARRIED to Ginny. Ron is MARRIED to Hermione. Katniss is MARRIED to Peeta. They all have BABIES. The lesson is clear: Life has an ending point. You get MARRIED and make BABIES, and that’s it. Done deal.
But in real life, people get divorced. Their children get sick and die. They change careers. They move cities. They come out of the closet (and not totally secretly, Dumbledore!). They keep changing.
So I’m going to warn you, if you keep reading my books, I’m going to keep pulling certainties out of your hands. Because I’m not afraid to write about asteroids, or immortal girls with silver hair, or post-apocalyptic societies that eschew all technology. I’m not even afraid to write about vampire-werewolf-Loch-Ness-Monster love triangles (though I had no plans to do so until I started writing this sentence). But I will not write something so patently unrealistic and dishonest as an ending that pretends the future is ever set in stone.
To quote that great poet known as ‘90s rock band Semisonic: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
And seriously, would you want to spend your whole life married to Ginny fucking Weasley?
-t
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