This Isn’t Going
to End Well

A PROFOUNDLY MOVING, COMPLEX, AND ORIGINAL MEMOIR FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF BIG FISH

“A heart-cracking exploration of the ways we construct ourselves, and how, despite any facade, no matter how bold, it can all come tumbling apart.”―Garden & Gun

“Exceptional… simultaneously sharp-edged and loving, honest and painfully haunting.”―BookPage

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“A memoir wrapped in an elegy… [that] maps a strangely stunning life… [Wallace] imbues this chronicle with tremendous compassion — for William, for everyone. This Isn’t Going to End Well gives off the particular radiance of a life lived hard, whatever else: as such, a brand of American bildungsroman. There’s deep satisfaction to its arc, despite its inherent sadness — a wondrous glimpse of the melding, in human doings, of fate, character and serendipity.”

―Washington Post

IF WE’RE LUCKY, we all encounter at least one person whose life elevates and inspires our own. For Daniel Wallace, that was his longtime friend and brother-in-law William Nealy. Seemingly perfect, impossibly cool, William was James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and MacGyver all rolled into one: an acclaimed outdoorsman, a famous cartoonist, an accomplished author, a master of all he undertook. William was the ideal that Daniel sought to emulate, and the person who gave him the courage to become a writer.

But when William took his own life at age forty-eight, Daniel’s heartbreak him led him to commit a grievous act of his own, a betrayal that took him down a path into the tortured recesses of William’s past. Eventually, a new picture of William emerged, of a man with too many secrets and too much shame to bear.

With his first memoir, acclaimed writer Daniel Wallace delivers a stunning book that is as innovative and emotionally resonant as his novels. Part love story, part true crime, part a desperate search for the self and how little we really can know another, This Isn’t Going to End Well tells an intimate and unforgettable story of what happens when we realize our heroes are human.

“A eulogy, a cautionary tale, a love letter and a sob of anger.”

―New York Times Book Review

“‘Unflinching’ is a word publishers like to use to describe memoirs. This Isn’t Going to End Well deserves the description as Mr. Wallace grapples with the past. It sounds like a heavy read, but it’s almost deceptively easy… Masterly.”

―Wall Street Journal

“Gripping… A story about the difference between the person we present to the world and the person we really are. It’s the gap between those two versions of ourselves that Wallace mines in this warts-and-all love letter to male friendship.”

―Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Daniel Wallace

DANIEL WALLACE is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, which was adapted and released as a movie and a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into over three dozen languages. His essays and interviews have been published in the Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers and Our State magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. His short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines and periodicals. He was awarded the Harper Lee Award, given to a nationally recognized Alabama writer who has made a significant lifelong contribution to Alabama letters. He was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Daniel Wallace

Author