We Have Reached the End of Our Show by Ali Gordon
“I don’t resent a life I spent any part of with you.”
We Have Reached the End of Our Show by Ali Gordon is everything all at once. It achieves a perfect balance between love and grief, fluff and angst. It’s perfect to the point where even the length of the story is ideal. For someone who generally avoids apocalyptic narratives because they remind me a bit too much of the pandemic, the themes of “found family”, “queer love story”, and “crystalline tribute to art, love, and things that make life worth living” were too good to pass up.
“I teach dance, for money. I’ll dance in someone else’s thing, if they ask me, while I’m choreographing and rehearsing my own shows. Which can take months. It’s a little lonely, you feel stupid, you give up on it for a while, you wake up with a new idea, you take it to a rehearsal room and feel like the greatest genius who ever lived.”
As both a creator and consumer of art, the author captures the life of an artist incredibly well. It’s comforting and encouraging to know that others also feel a little “lonely”, a little “stupid”, and sometimes like “giving up” when struggling to create. Yet, the same passion that fuels them can also strike me at unexpected times.
“I like being able to eat your cooking. I went for a run on Saturday. You noticed that, right?”
Gabe and Josie love each other so fiercely and authentically until the very end. Josie, introverted, shares the most vulnerable parts of himself and continues to care for Gabe, despite the possibility of losing him to terminal illness. Gabe’s defiance in the face of it—his desire to live and continue creating art—considerately represents the disabled community.
In my interview (coming soon!) with the author Ali Gordon, she mentions part of the reason the book takes place during an apocalypse is because it illustrates the most heightened version of people’s reactions “when they know that time is limited”. Writing the novel also helped her process “the loss of potential” and “the grief for what could’ve been”, while it’s not autobiographical at all. The grief the characters encounter as they realize everything they love will be stripped away from them reminds me of my privilege of experiencing the world.
I fear I will never be the same after reading this book. It has altered my brain chemistry. It’s a wild ride. The End of Our Show has left me “queasy with motion sickness”.
Thank you so so much to Ali Gordon and Wildling Press for the digital ARC!
Quiet, caring Josie and rebellious performer Gabe have been together six years when they hear the news: a world-ending asteroid is set to hit Earth in twenty-five days. This is devastating for humanity, but for Gabe, it’s simply speeding up what his terminal diagnosis had already set in motion. The world is thrown into chaos around them, and when Gabe’s young, carefree cousin Lisi shows up with a car and a plan, the three begin a journey none of them ever expected: a road trip through the end of the world.
Profound, moving, and delicate, We Have Reached the End of Our Show is a crystalline depiction of the best of humanity. Gabe, Josie, and Lisi take turns driving us through a story about real love, real family, and the real purpose we find when the careful map of our life is ripped from under us, laying bare the unexpected nexus of ties that connect us to each other.
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