The Last Revision: A Novel

"Compelling. I wanted to know more from the very start." — T.J. Elliott, author of Retrospective.Bill is ninety-nine years old, sitting in his wheelchair, when a young woman he barely recognizes walks into his room and hands him something he lost decades ago: a slim green journal with a Snoopy sticker on the cover.His journal.And the memories begin.The Last Revision moves through an entire life—from an Easter morning in upstate New York, through childhood moves across continents, a hard-won coming out, years of solitude in a New York City studio apartment, a late and lasting love, and a world that slowly, then all at once, changes beyond recognition. Bill has lived all of it. And on the eve of his hundredth birthday, he is finally willing to look.Written from the imagined perspective of a man forty years older than the author, the novel blends lived memory with an invented future—reconstructing the past as it was, and imagining what might come after. The result is a life seen whole: remembered, revised, and, at last, understood.At once intimate and expansive, The Last Revision is a novel about what it feels like to hold a life in your hands all at once—the losses and the luck, the curtain calls and the heartbreaks—and discover, with something close to astonishment, that it was a joy. Read more