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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

NOBODY EVER TALKS ABOUT ANYTHING BUT THE END

Liz Levine

A Memoir of Loss

A searing, darkly comic dictionary of life and loss that dares to move beyond the common platitudes of sympathy and grief.
In November of 2016, Tamara Levine reached a breaking point after years of living with mental illness. In the dark hours before dawn, she sent a final message to her family, and plunged off her balcony.

Her surviving sister, Liz, responded to this tragedy in the same way she dealt with everything in her life: by capably handling what she needed to get done. The ensuing endless, and at times burdensome, sympathy crystalized that the focus was on how Tamara died, not how she lived. And that life needed to be acknowledged too, in all its messy complications. Not with a nostalgic rose-colored glasses tribute, but with a candid and unflinching account of what mental illness does, to an individual and to her family.

Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End is an alphabetical account, from ashes to Zephyr, that weaves Tamara's story with another significant death, that of Liz's childhood love, Judson, to cancer. The result is haunting, funny, bittersweet, sad, sometimes cruel, and sometimes heartbreaking. With frank and spare language, Liz exposes the raw and uncomfortable truths that we often shy away from, and certainly don't share with others. She tells us about the Mayor of Crazy Twitter account she created to capture some of Tamara's outbursts. She talks about the conflicts in a complex, talented, often difficult family. She reveals how a decades-old death, unmourned, casts a long shadow.

An accomplished multiplatform storyteller, Liz combines the dark humor of Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant with the frankness and heartbreak of Mark Lukash's My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward. The inventive structure imposes order on the randomness of grief, uncannily mimicking the way memories can shift and blur what is most painful.

LIZ LEVINE is an award-winning producer whose credits include Kyra Sedgwick's directorial debut ‘Story of a Girl' and Douglas Coupland's television series “Jpod.” She completed her Masters in Journalism at UBC and has written for the National Post, The Walrus, Playback Magazine, and The Vancouver Sun. She divides her time between Vancouver and Los Angeles, California.
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Book

Published by Simon & Schuster Canada

Comments

"Liz Levine plunges into the bloody, emotional pulp of lived experience...[It] will ring devastatingly true to anyone who has ever experienced loss, anyone who has never been able to put into words the complexities and contradictions of their feelings. Nobody Ever Talks about Anything But the End is a balm, a palliative for the darkest times of life, and of the year." – The Toronto Star

"Two deaths inspire a moving meditation on loss. In an affecting debut memoir, producer and journalist Levine reflects on overwhelming and protracted grief." Read more...

“Haunting and filled with dark humour, this is an honest and calm look at the chaos of life.” – The Globe and Mail