Coming to the end: A review of Tyler Dempsey’s Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward
Written by Joseph Edwin Haeger
When Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962, he pulled together multiple slangs to make up the dialect. Now, I’m an American. I have my own slang (and I read this book in 2004—42 years after its original publication). To say the least, I was at a disadvantage when I decided to read it. Still, I cracked it open because I loved the Stanley Kubrick movie. I was immediately lost in a swell of language I could barely grasp, but my mom didn’t raise no quitter. It’s a slim book, so if anything, I figured I could limp my way through for the satisfaction of simply finishing it.
Then, around the quarter mark, something amazing clicked. I’d never experienced anything like it before, but suddenly I understood everything Alex, the main character and speaker, was saying. Seemingly without much effort, I learned the slang. After that, I breezed through the book and loved it as much as the movie.
I bring all this up because Burgess employed a simple tactic: he refused to bring the reader up to speed. You start reading A Clockwork Orange and it’s your job to catch up. Sink or swim. Learn the language or don’t. Tyler Dempsey uses a similar approach to his short autofiction novel, Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward.
Dempseys drops us into a situation where there are multiple messy, preexisting relationships with evident history—romantic and otherwise—and it’s our job to sift through the story and figure out what happened before that first page. We’re witnesses to the aftermath of a completely different story, but Dempsey isn’t concerned with catching us up because he has another, more important, story to tell.
Katie G is not interested in men. When she and Tyler (the character) start hanging out, it’s supposed to be purely platonic. They live in Alaska, and Tyler’s residence is out of the way, void of everyday luxuries like an indoor bathroom…and neighbors. In a word, he’s lonely. He recently came out of a long relationship and needs some kind of connection to another person. Things get complicated when Katie G and he get along better than he anticipated. He starts developing feelings for her and, to both of their surprise, she reciprocates them. They weren’t supposed to get together, but at the same time, they can’t deny the authenticity of their connection.
Quick question. Is everyone pro- or anti-Kevin Smith at the moment? I’ve generally lived in the positive camp since I saw Mallrats in junior high. Even though I’m a fan of Smith, I can still admit a lot of his critics make valid points (his movies lack visual flair, although they have gotten better; he’s overly schmaltzy; his movies are immature), but I still love his perspective. Yeah, a lot of his dialogue might sound overly verbose, but I think Smith can get to the truth of complicated situations.
One example—and I’m sure you saw this coming—is Smith’s best movie (IMO), Chasing Amy. In this flick, we follow Holden, a comic book writer who falls in love with a lesbian. Through their mutual interests (she’s also a comic creator), they find themselves in a romantic relationship. It’s not long before their love erodes because of a plethora of circumstances, but in the end, the movie remains true to all the emotions involved.
Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward has truer interactions and conversations because, I assume, all its moments actually happened*. Dempsey takes his true story and forms it into the shape of a narrative; by combining that with a stream-of-consciousness style, he effectively drops us right into the situation with Katie G. and him.
There is a truth to this story that can’t be denied because we’re living it with him, side-by-side. It feels as if, when Dempsey wrote it, he let it all spill out of him in real-time. It doesn’t feel like he plotted ahead. Instead, he relived these moments as he jotted them down. It’s those bedrock emotions that not only pull us through the story but also make it so searing and unforgettable.
Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward is a slim book. It’s only 179 pages and, like I mentioned above, it doesn’t slow down for the reader. Dempsey cuts close to the bone with this one. Had he expanded on the story and added more context, I think he still would’ve delivered a banger, but it would have lost its raw quality, lessening the overall effect. In its current state, it’s like we can see him lying there, heartbroken on his kitchen floor, needing to do something to relieve the pressure of heartbreak. The relief Dempsey chose was a pen and notebook.
There’s a voyeuristic effect to reading this new novel because he lays everything out so bare, but that’s the whole point—and it’s precisely why Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward is as powerful as it is.
*This assumption is based on listening to Dempsey’s fantastic interview show Another Fucking Writing Podcast.
Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward
Published by Anxiety Press
179pgs
Paperback: 979-8861959339 | October 2023 | $18.99
Joseph Edwin Haeger is the author of the experimental memoir Learn to Swim (University of Hell Press, 2015) and the novella, Bardo (Thirty West Publishing, 2023.) He writes fiction, essays, poetry, and screenplays. As a litmus test, he tells people his favorite movie is Face/Off, but there’s a part of him that’s afraid it’s true. He lives in the Inland PNW.