Title: This Isn’t Going to End Well
Author: Daniel Wallace
Genre: Memoir
Rating: DNF
If we’re lucky, we all encounter at least one person whose life elevates and inspires our own. For Daniel Wallace, that was 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, and the person who gave him the courage to become a writer.
But when William took his own life at age forty eight, Daniel’s heartbreak led him to commit a grievous act of his own, a betrayal that took him down a path into the tortured recesses of William’s past. Eventually a new picture emerged of a man with too many secrets and too much shame to bear.
I wanted to like this. I read 20% of it, and I enjoyed the voice and the action—but I did not like the narrator/author at all. Selfish and self-absorbed people are not my cup of tea, and the narrator was both of these things, so I just could not stand to read any more of this. I get that a certain amount of self-absorption is inherent in memoirs, but the tone and amount of it present in this just wasn’t for me.
(Galley courtesy of Algonquin Books in exchange for an honest review.)
Tomorrow Is Another Day 