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The Things We Leave Unfinished: Who Deserves a Happy Ending? · The Book Brief Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Picture a stack of typed pages in a house in
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  Speaker 1: the Colorado mountains. It is a love story set in
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: wartime England, and it stops in the middle of the
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  Speaker 1: worst moment, with a pilot missing somewhere off the Dutch
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  Speaker 1: coast and his wife packing a suitcase she does not
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  Speaker 1: want to pack. The woman who typed those pages has
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  Speaker 1: been dead for six months. She was a famous romance novelist,
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  Speaker 1: and this is the only book she ever left unfinished.
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  Speaker 1: That stack of paper sits at the center of Rebecca
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  Speaker 1: Yaros' The Things We Leave Unfinished, and the question it
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  Speaker 1: puts to the people holding it is one you can
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  Speaker 1: carry out of the room with you. When the truth
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  Speaker 1: of how a story ended is cruel, what do you
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  Speaker 1: owe the people inside it? The ending they got, or
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  Speaker 1: the ending they deserved? Yaros answers that question twice, in
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  Speaker 1: opposite directions, and the second answer rewrites the first. So
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  Speaker 1: I am going to tell you how the book ends,
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  Speaker 1: because in this book, the ending is the argument. The
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  Speaker 1: novel came out in 2021, a dual timeline romance from
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  Speaker 1: a writer known mostly to romance readers and a military
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  Speaker 1: spouse who knows something about waiting for a pilot to
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  Speaker 1: come home. Two years later, a book about dragon riders
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  Speaker 1: called Fourth Wing turned her into a publishing event and
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  Speaker 1: millions of new readers went back through everything she had written.
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  Speaker 1: This one came out of that search with a reputation.
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  Speaker 1: It is the yaros that makes you cry. The reputation
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  Speaker 1: is earned, and it also lets people skip the most
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  Speaker 1: interesting thing the book does, which is think hard about
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  Speaker 1: its own genre. Georgia Stanton is 28 and freshly divorced
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  Speaker 1: from a film director whose affairs played out in the tabloids.
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  Speaker 1: She comes home to the Colorado town where her great-grandmother
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  Speaker 1: raised her after her mother kept leaving. That great-grandmother was
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  Speaker 1: Scarlett Stanton, a romance novelist adored by readers for decades,
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  Speaker 1: and her mother, who wants the money, has already arranged
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  Speaker 1: to sell the unfinished manuscript. The publisher has a writer
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  Speaker 1: in mind to complete it. His name is Noah Harrison,
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  Speaker 1: a bestseller whose novels end in grief so reliably. that
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  Speaker 1: his covers all look alike. Georgia meets him first in
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  Speaker 1: a bookstore without knowing who he is, overhears him complaining
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  Speaker 1: about two nearly identical covers, and tells him his books
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  Speaker 1: are one sad book printed over and over. A few
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  Speaker 1: days later, he shows up at her house for the meeting.
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  Speaker 1: She holds the rights, so she holds the pen. She signs,
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  Speaker 1: takes final approval of the manuscript, and adds one rule.
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  Speaker 1: The lovers do not get a happy ending. Notice how
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  Speaker 1: the book has arranged its two people. The woman raised
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  Speaker 1: by a writer of happy endings demands tragedy. The man
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  Speaker 1: who built a career on tragedy wants a reunion. Georgia
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  Speaker 1: has decided that love does not last, and she refuses
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  Speaker 1: to let a novel say otherwise about her own family.
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  Speaker 1: Noah thinks the lovers earned their ending, and he hears
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  Speaker 1: her rule as a dare. They settle, eventually, on a bargain.
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  Speaker 1: He will write both endings, and she will choose. The
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  Speaker 1: pages they are fighting over open in 1940. Scarlett and
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  Speaker 1: her younger sister Constance are daughters of a titled English
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  Speaker 1: family that is running out of money, and both serve
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  Speaker 1: in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, tracking German raids across
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  Speaker 1: a map table. Scarlett has a rule of her own,
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  Speaker 1: which is that she does not date pilots, because pilots die.
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  Speaker 1: An American volunteer flying for the RAF, a young man
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  Speaker 1: from Colorado, gives the sisters a lift on a country road,
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  Speaker 1: and the rule lasts about as long as a couple
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  Speaker 1: of dinners. What follows moves fast, the way wartime courtship
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  Speaker 1: moves in these books. German planes bomb their airfield while
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  Speaker 1: the two of them are arguing on the tarmac, and
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  Speaker 1: he throws himself over her as a hanger goes up.
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  Speaker 1: Her parents announce her engagement to a rich man with
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  Speaker 1: a reputation for cruelty, and Scarlett refuses him and gives
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  Speaker 1: up her title, then marries the pilot in a small
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  Speaker 1: ceremony her family does not attend. Their son is born
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  Speaker 1: on the day Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Someone else pays
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  Speaker 1: for the refusal. Constance's fiancé is killed in a raid,
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  Speaker 1: and to save the family land, she marries the cruel
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  Speaker 1: man her sister turned down. The scene I keep going
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  Speaker 1: back to is quieter than any of that. Scarlett wants
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  Speaker 1: to be a novelist, and the two sisters talk about
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  Speaker 1: what a writer owes her characters. Constance tells her to
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  Speaker 1: be kind and give them all a happy ending, since
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  Speaker 1: that is more than anyone gets in the real world.
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  Speaker 1: Scarlett answers that the kindest thing might be to leave
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  Speaker 1: their stories unfinished, so they keep their possibilities. On a
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  Speaker 1: first read, it sounds like a pretty exchange about craft.
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  Speaker 1: It is the whole book in two lines, and you
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  Speaker 1: will not know that for another 200 pages. Then the
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  Speaker 1: war does what the sisters were afraid of. The pilot
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  Speaker 1: is escorting bombers over the Netherlands when his Spitfire is
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  Speaker 1: hit in the fuel tank. He radios that he loves
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  Speaker 1: her and goes down through thick cloud. Nobody sees the crash.
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  Speaker 1: He is listed as missing and Scarlett refuses to accept
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  Speaker 1: anything more final than that word. His uncle, who ferries
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  Speaker 1: bombers across the Atlantic, arranges to fly her and the
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  Speaker 1: baby to America. The manuscript breaks off there with scarlet packing.
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  Speaker 1: So the book has given you two couples and one argument.
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  Speaker 1: Georgia wants the truth of the war. Noah wants the
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  Speaker 1: mercy of the genre. And the pages they are fighting
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  Speaker 1: over stop at the worst possible moment. What nobody in
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  Speaker 1: that house is thought to ask is who typed them. Meanwhile,
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  Speaker 1: in Colorado, Georgia and Noah do what the genre requires.
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  Speaker 1: He takes her to a climbing gym and promises not
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  Speaker 1: to let her fall, and she takes him to the
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  Speaker 1: gazebo by the creek where her great-grandmother used to type.
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  Speaker 1: Georgia sees a shrine to waiting. Noah sees a promise
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  Speaker 1: that someone came back. Her mother takes the advance and disappears,
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  Speaker 1: which is the one thing Georgia always expected of her.
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  Speaker 1: When her ex-husband tries to reach the film rights through Noah,
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  Speaker 1: Noah turns him down, and that refusal is what finally
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  Speaker 1: gets through to her. They fall into bed, and she
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  Speaker 1: insists it is a fling that ends when the book does.
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  Speaker 1: Then she learns that Noah finished the manuscript six weeks
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  Speaker 1: earlier and hid it to keep that deadline from arriving.
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  Speaker 1: For a woman whose husband lied to her for years,
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  Speaker 1: that is disqualifying. She throws him out, reads both of
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  Speaker 1: his endings alone, and chooses the one where the pilot
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  Speaker 1: never comes home. And then a package arrives, arranged by
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  Speaker 1: her great-grandmother before she died, with the original pages and
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  Speaker 1: a set of letters. What they reveal sends the reader
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  Speaker 1: back to 1942. On a street in Ipswich, on the
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  Speaker 1: way to the airfield, the sisters are caught in a raid.
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  Speaker 1: The blast throws them into a garden. The baby is unhurt.
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  Speaker 1: But Scarlet has shrapnel in her back, and she dies
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  Speaker 1: in her sister's arms after making Constance promise to take
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  Speaker 1: her son to America. At the airfield, dazed and bloodied,
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  Speaker 1: Constance is holding her sister's handbag with the papers and
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  Speaker 1: the visa inside. The officers call her Scarlet, the pilot's
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  Speaker 1: uncle calls her Scarlet, and she lets them. The woman
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  Speaker 1: who raised Georgia, who wrote decades of beloved romances as
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  Speaker 1: Scarlett Stanton, was Constance. She could never say so. Legally,
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  Speaker 1: she was still the wife of the cruel man in England,
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  Speaker 1: and he had buried the dead sister on his own land,
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  Speaker 1: believing he was burying his wife. Only after he died,
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  Speaker 1: many years later, did Constance marry the veterinarian who had
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  Speaker 1: been asking her for years. Georgia reads all of this
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  Speaker 1: after she has already chosen the tragic ending. She calls
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  Speaker 1: the publisher and reverses herself. In the version that goes
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  Speaker 1: to print, the pilot survives the crash with help from
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  Speaker 1: the Dutch resistance and comes home to the gazebo by
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  Speaker 1: the creek, where his wife is waiting. The early reviews
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  Speaker 1: tear Noah apart for giving Scarlett Stanton a happy ending,
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  Speaker 1: which is its own small joke, since happy endings were
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  Speaker 1: the whole reason people bought Scarlett Stanton. Now go back
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  Speaker 1: to that conversation about craft, because it has turned inside out.
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  Speaker 1: Constance told her sister to give every character a happy ending.
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  Speaker 1: Scarlet said the kind thing might be to leave them unfinished.
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  Speaker 1: Then Scarlet died, and Constance spent the rest of her
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  Speaker 1: life under her sister's name, writing happy endings for strangers,
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  Speaker 1: novel after novel. The one story she never finished was Scarlet's.
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  Speaker 1: For everyone else, she kept her own rule. For her sister,
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  Speaker 1: she kept her sisters. That is the best idea in
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  Speaker 1: the book, and it changes what kind of book you
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  Speaker 1: have been reading. Read from the end, it turns into
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  Speaker 1: a portrait of a ghost writer, a woman who signed
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  Speaker 1: another woman's name to every page she wrote for almost
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  Speaker 1: 80 years. The unfinished manuscript was never writer's block. It
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  Speaker 1: was the one place where she refused to lie. The
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  Speaker 1: obvious comparison is Ian McEwan's Atonement from 2001, and readers
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  Speaker 1: have been making it since this book came out. McEwan's
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  Speaker 1: narrator is a novelist in her 70s who has spent
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  Speaker 1: her life rewriting the story of two lovers she wronged
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  Speaker 1: when she was 13. At the end, she admits that
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  Speaker 1: the reunion she gave them never happened. Both died in 1940,
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  Speaker 1: one of them in a bombing, and her happy ending
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  Speaker 1: is a fiction she offers as a last kindness. McEwan
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  Speaker 1: wants you to feel how much that kindness serves the writer.
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  Speaker 1: It lets her live with herself. Yaros takes the same
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  Speaker 1: move and pulls the guilt out of it. Georgia has
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  Speaker 1: wronged no one. The happy ending she restores pays something
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  Speaker 1: back to a woman who gave up her own name
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  Speaker 1: so a baby could grow up safe. In McEwen, the
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  Speaker 1: invented reunion is a confession. In Yaros, it is a
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  Speaker 1: debt being settled, and the book keeps the move honest
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  Speaker 1: in one careful way. It keeps two records. The novel
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  Speaker 1: carries the reunion, and the family keeps the grave. My
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  Speaker 1: trust in the book runs out at this point, or
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  Speaker 1: half of it does. Yaros understands that an ending costs something.
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  Speaker 1: She built more than 400 pages on that understanding. Then
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  Speaker 1: she turns to the couple she can still control, and
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  Speaker 1: the cost disappears. Noah hid a finished book for six
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  Speaker 1: weeks to keep the woman he loved from leaving on schedule,
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  Speaker 1: which is the same species of lie she came home
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  Speaker 1: to recover from. The repair is money. He pays for
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  Speaker 1: a search off the Dutch coast, finds the pilot's spitfire
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  Speaker 1: on the seabed, and comes back with the wedding ring.
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  Speaker 1: It is a lovely gesture. and it is the genre
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  Speaker 1: paying itself. Nobody has to change. Someone just has to
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  Speaker 1: be rich enough. The epilogue then hands the living couple
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  Speaker 1: what the dead had to be argued into, a baby
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  Speaker 1: on the way and a last scene in the bookstore
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  Speaker 1: where they first fought. The whole novel is an argument
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  Speaker 1: about whether a happy ending has to be earned, and
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  Speaker 1: the one couple it never asks to earn anything is
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  Speaker 1: the couple it lets live. A lot of readers say
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  Speaker 1: they wanted to skip the Colorado chapters and get back
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  Speaker 1: to the war. I think that instinct is right, for
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  Speaker 1: a sharper reason than chemistry. The war chapters obey the
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  Speaker 1: book's own rule about endings. The Colorado chapters are exempt
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  Speaker 1: from it. And still, I cannot settle what to make
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  Speaker 1: of Constance, which is the part of this book I
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  Speaker 1: will carry longest. Late in the story, Georgia realizes that
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  Speaker 1: Noah's happy ending was truer to life than he could
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  Speaker 1: have known because it was Constance's ending all along. Constance
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  Speaker 1: got the late marriage and the long life in the mountains.
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  Speaker 1: Scarlett got a ruined street in 1942. So the happy
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  Speaker 1: ending Georgia restores is a true story. It just belongs
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  Speaker 1: to the wrong sister. For almost 80 years, Constance wrote
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  Speaker 1: reunions for invented couples while the real ones in her
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  Speaker 1: family ended on a street and over the sea. You
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  Speaker 1: can read that as generosity. A woman handing strangers the
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  Speaker 1: thing the war took from her own people. You can
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  Speaker 1: read it as anesthesia. A woman who could only bear
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  Speaker 1: to write what she had never been allowed to live.
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  Speaker 1: The book chooses generosity without hesitating. I keep both readings open,
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  Speaker 1: and the book is better when you do. If this
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  Speaker 1: is your pace, a single book at a time read slowly,
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  Speaker 1: and argued with, follow the book brief project. The next
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  Speaker 1: one is already open on the desk. In the epilogue,
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  Speaker 1: Georgia and Noah go to England, to a headstone that
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  Speaker 1: carries Constance's name and holds Scarlet. The stone has stood
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  Speaker 1: there since 1942, and for all that time it has
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  Speaker 1: told everyone who walked past it the same small lie
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  Speaker 1: that kept a baby safe. Two people kneel over a
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  Speaker 1: hole no deeper than a hand. They press the pilot's
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  Speaker 1: ring into the ground beside the stone. The ring that
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  Speaker 1: went into the sea with his plane during the war
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  Speaker 1: and came up nearly 80 years later. The novel on
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  Speaker 1: the shelves has the reunion. The grave has the truth.
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  Speaker 1: And between the two of them, in the earth, the
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  Speaker 1: ring is finally with the right woman under the wrong name.