End of Life: A Novel

A heartbreaking, sexy debut following a tumultuous year in the life of a late-twenties gay textile artist who must help his father die as his own life transforms

When James, a Brooklyn-based textile artist in his late twenties, is home for the holidays in Silicon Valley, he discovers that the once-sharp mind of his father, a ballet dancer turned lawyer, is beginning to falter. As occasionally misplaced words give way to increasingly incoherent speech, it becomes clear that something is gravely wrong.

In the year that follows, James flies back and forth from New York to California, navigating his father’s health alongside his loving sister, an overwhelmed surgeon, while his own life changes drastically, his adulthood beginning to take form: a long-distance lover reshapes his worldview, a friend gives birth, a passion develops into a meaningful vocation. In the cycle between the thrilling possibilities of life in New York City and the revelatory isolation of returning home to care for an ailing parent, connection feels sharper and more ghostly than ever. At year’s end, James’s father’s decline has progressed to the point that he asks for physician-assisted suicide. It is up to James to arrange it for him.

Lyrical and erotic, comic and devastating, End of Life is an incisive, wide-ranging novel about what can and cannot be said and what will and will not end.