This Isn't Going to End Well

This narrative nonfiction memoir tells the story of Daniel Wallace's lifelong relationship with his brother-in-law, William Nealy, a celebrated cartoonist, outdoorsman, and author who died by suicide on July 19, 2001, at age 48. Wallace wrote the book over 22 years of complicated grief, drawing on his own memories and on William's private journals, which he discovered after the death of his sister Holly in 2011.

The story opens in 1971, when 12-year-old Daniel watched William, Holly's boyfriend, stand on the roof of the family's house in Mountain Brook, an affluent suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, and jump 25 feet into the swimming pool. William was 18, and he climbed back up and jumped again and again. He modeled an openness to risk that no one in Daniel's sheltered, wealthy family had ever shown him. Holly, Daniel's older sister by six years, was beautiful and fearless herself, though three years from the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, the disease that would consume her life.

Daniel began imitating William's style: torn T-shirts, long hair, quiet disdain. William, a high school dropout working construction, visited Daniel's secret basement room, built furniture, and made him a pipe from a hollowed-out Jenga tile. Their relationship's ground rules formed early: don't ask questions, talk as little as possible, do things together rather than share feelings. When William took 14-year-old Daniel to a Clint Eastwood triple feature, Daniel watched William as much as the screen, learning how to be. William modeled himself on Eastwood's "Man with No Name": quiet, detached, basically good but deeply wounded.

Wallace recounts a formative trauma William never mentioned. In 1965, during a Boy Scout camping trip at a sinkhole in Gordo, Alabama, 12-year-old William and three other Scouts dug a tunnel under an overhang that collapsed at night, killing the Fogelman twins. Wallace theorizes this event drove William to become a medic, mountain climber, and amateur geologist, determined never again to stand by helplessly while friends died.

Holly and William met in 1964 as neighborhood children and became a couple in high school. After one near-final breakup, William flattened two nickels on a railroad track and drilled holes in them; they each wore one on a leather cord for the rest of their lives. When Holly developed rheumatoid arthritis at 21, William stayed, becoming her nurse, cooking every meal, and taping her hands to canoe stirrups so she could still paddle.

In 1976, after conservative locals burned down the river outpost of the outdoor store Liquid Adventure, where William worked in northern Alabama, Holly and William traveled across America for a year before settling in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1978. During their absence, Daniel fell in love with a girl named Sally, who had an alcohol addiction. He broke up with her before college; that fall, she died in a car accident. Holly and William returned early to help Daniel through his grief.

Wallace introduces Edgar Hitchcock, originally Holly and William's friend, who befriended Daniel after Sally's death. Edgar had scoliosis requiring spinal surgery at 13, an operation that saved his life after his brother Malcolm died of the same condition. His sense of living on borrowed time drove him to become a cocaine dealer in Birmingham while also encouraging Daniel to write. Wallace recognizes Edgar and William as spiritual twins, identical in their attraction to danger and secret lives.

Daniel struggled through his twenties to become a writer. He transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be near Holly and William, then worked briefly for his father's import business in Japan before returning to pursue writing. Back in Chapel Hill, William drew cartoon-laden river maps combining cartography with his self-taught artistic style, published his first book, Whitewater Home Companion, in 1981, and eventually produced 10 books, becoming a legendary figure in adrenaline sports. Watching William gave Daniel permission to begin writing himself.

In April 1994, Edgar disappeared. William and Holly drove to Birmingham, where, at a gathering of Edgar's friends, William met a man named Stanley Byrd. During their handshake, William became convinced Stanley had killed Edgar. He befriended Stanley as a double agent, waiting for him to incriminate himself. In January 1995, Edgar's body was found in an abandoned apartment complex, shot five times and wrapped in carpet. Stanley was arrested, but the case collapsed: After repeated delays and four different prosecutors, charges were dropped in July 1997. A prosecutor later told Wallace that the couple's own investigation may have tainted witness testimony.

The case's failure devastated William. On February 3, 1995, he put a shotgun to his head for the first time; Holly wrestled it away. Wallace traces William's concept of the "immortality project," drawn from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death: the idea that humans need a consuming task to give life meaning. Holly's illness was William's first such project; Edgar's case was his second. With both failed, William had no reason to keep living that satisfied his own internal logic.

William's journals revealed a man in constant struggle behind the fearless persona, recording "constant S.I." (suicidal ideation) as casually as noting what he ate for dinner. After watching the film Princess Caraboo about a woman who fabricated a false identity, William recognized himself in her predicament, but Wallace notes a critical difference: Both of William's selves were real. He genuinely saved lives and published books; his crisis was that he could not determine which self was authentic. In his journals, he wrote in capital letters: "I MUST NOT LET THEM SEE WHO I REALLY AM." Among the journals, Wallace found a sealed envelope containing secrets William could not commit even to his private notebooks, including that a Scoutmaster had sexually assaulted him at approximately 11 or 12. Wallace speculates this was the moment William first split himself in two.

On July 15, 2001, William woke from a suicidal dream. That evening, Daniel invited Holly and William to dinner at a restaurant where Daniel's wife, Laura, was bartending. William came but was glassy-eyed and detached; Laura later believed he came to say goodbye. On Wednesday, Holly left for the hospital. William set their animals free, wrote a suicide note, and drove to their houseboat at Kerr Lake in Virginia. The next morning, Holly found a note on the van's dashboard directing her to call Daniel. She read it to him over the phone in a flat voice, then took a sharp breath. In his longest suicide note, William attributed his decision to chronic pain, drug addiction, depression, and a childhood promise never to endure again the suffocating attacks of severe asthma, telling Holly her "beauty and infinite capacity for love-giving kept my head above water for thirty years."

After William's death, Holly spiraled into grief. Daniel became her primary caretaker, a role William had filled. She died in 2011, at 57, during surgery. Wallace inherited William's ashes and Holly's instructions to mix and scatter them together. Instead, consumed by hatred for what William's suicide had done to Holly, he scattered William's ashes alone in his side yard one night, an act of revenge. He also secretly kept William's journals after finding them in Holly's closet, defying the family's agreement to discard them.

In the epilogue, set at Thanksgiving 2019, Laura suggested Daniel hold a service for William at Mineral Springs Farm in Maryland, where Daniel's father and Holly are buried. Daniel filled a leather pouch with substitute grave goods: arrowheads, train-flattened nickels, strands of Holly's hair, and dirt from where he had scattered William's ashes. At the graveyard, a white peacock appeared and stopped to look at him. Wallace states he does not believe in afterlives or spirits returning as animals, but kneeling in the cold, he acknowledges: "I believed in the mystery." He apologized aloud for keeping Holly and William apart, then picked up the trowel and started digging.