Found my old diary with a fake ending and it changed how I read finales

Last month I dug out a journal from 3 years ago, the one I kept during a rough move to Austin. The last entry said everything was fine and settled, but I remember that week being a total mess, boxes everywhere and my car breaking down. It hit me that people write fake endings to protect themselves, even in private. Now when a book wraps up too neat, I wonder if the author is lying to themselves too. Anyone else spot an ending that felt like a cover-up?

1 comments

1 Comment

leeknight16d ago

and that carries over to how we read endings, too. it's like we give authors a pass for tying things up too clean because we want that comfort ourselves. i've noticed it with series finales especially, when a character who's been struggling for five books suddenly gets everything sorted in two pages. it reads like the author hit their deadline and just needed to close the loop, not like the character actually earned that peace. makes you wonder if we're all just handing out fake endings to ourselves in different ways.