Super Sad True Love Story

About a month later, Lenny writes to his diary that he has “made a major decision: I am going to die” (302). All that will be left will be “words, words, words,” the data, that “the soupy base of [his] existence uptexted to a GlobalTeens account” (302). This will be his last diary entry.

When Lenny returns, the apartment building across from his is “turned into shells, their orange carapaces burned black” (303). Around the building, workers raise Credit Poles as Lenny and Eunice look on. Shortly thereafter, he meets pregnant Grace for a picnic in the park. He imagines what the child will be like because he knows each parent separately, while his own parents had seemed “a uni-parent, made heavy with child by a Yiddish Holy Ghost” (304).

Grace shares the news that she and Vishnu plan to more to Vancouver. Lenny is quickly overwhelmed by the departure of “the woman who had loved [him] most” (304). Grace denies Lenny’s assertion that “Vishnu collaborated with the ARA, with the Bipartisans” (305). Instead, she works to hatch a plan for Lenny, too, to emigrate to Canada. Lenny recoils because “they’ll never let Eunice in” (306) without any education credentials.

Later in October, Eunice messages Lenny at work to call him back to the apartment. Relocation Services has arrived to kick everyone out of the apartment building. The buildings will be torn down “in case of flooding,” a representative says, even though Lenny calls the claim “bull crap” (307). Lenny wants to bash the representatives head “against the cement of [his] beloved building, [his] homely refuge, [his] simple home” (307).

The elderly, who will be moved to abandoned housing in New Rochelle, ask Lenny to help. He realizes that he cannot help them, his parents, Eunice, or even himself. Upstairs, he finds Eunice packing books into boxes; without hesitation, she tells him to join her. They work “in silence for the better part of three hours” (309).

Lenny wants her to “feel the high morality of being right” (309). He watches her anger fade. Wanting to help her, too, he walks to the closet to choose some of her clothes to save, but Eunice insists that the books are “all [they] have room for” (310).

Joshie moves them into a building for Staatling-Wapachung employees, two rooms in a building on the Upper East Side. Lenny feels desperate because he is about to turn 40 and feels as if he has nothing. He wants Eunice to say “you have me” (311), but she does not. The two go for a walk one day and reflect on their first memories together in New York. Eventually, the conversation turns to Lenny’s desire to escape together to Canada. Eunice only says that he is “so dramatic,” and her tone, “not just compassionless but assured” (312) makes Lenny nervous.

Lenny walks Eunice to work at the job that Joshie found for her. As he watches her enter the store, a Town Car pulls up and a figure who looks like Joshie emerges from her. Lenny recognizes that he is “checking up on his investment” and observes the “worshipful” (313) way that Eunice looks at him. Lenny gets drunk in a bar nearby with a handful of other Russian-Americans.

One fall day, Post-Human Services holds an art show/party for the Politburo and the Chinese People’s Capitalist Party. Eunice initiates sex that morning, but it overwhelms Lenny. He repeats, as they shower, “I can’t do this” (314). Eunice calms him down.

The subject of the art was “the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead” (315). Lenny feels strongly about it and wants “to congratulate the artist on his work” and bring him out to his parents’ “more hopeful” (316) post-Rupture life, but the artist is protected. Elsewhere in the room, Lenny sees nervous Media people bearing their badges of allegiance to Staatling-Wapachung. The company “bigwigs” are “dressed like young kids” (317).

As he walks to Eunice and Sally, who talk with Joshie, Lenny passes a disarming photograph of a Native American man in Omaha. He does “what everyone eventually did: looked away” (318). As he meditates on the image, Joshie approaches him and explains that Lenny and Eunice need “to spend some time apart” but that eventually the three of them “could reconcile” (319).

As Joshie speaks, Lenny thinks of his father, his “humiliation” (319) and hard work as a Jewish immigrant. By the time the pair circles to Eunice and Sally, all Lenny knows to do is ask Eunice if she is hot in her over-thick outfit. Before they can speak, Howard Shu runs in to introduce the Chinese visitors. In the chaos of their entry, Lenny is “pushed out of the glass house” and into “the winter-cold air” (320).

All he wants is “to go home” and visit “the 740 square feet that used to be” (320) his in the old New York City. He notices, when he arrives home to his new apartment, that “Eunice’s allergy medications and tampons and expensive lotions [are] already gone” (321). Only a bottle of the Cetaphil soap Eunice uses to clean him remains, and so Lenny takes a shower “in the water’s painful heat” until his skin is “at last as gentle and clean as the bottle promised” (321).

In the last chapter of the novel, “Larry Abraham” writes the notes to the “People’s Literature Publishing House” (322) edition of his diary from the Tuscan Free State. He reflects on his childhood love from his parents: “If they died,” he felt once, “I died” (322). He recalls his fears, one day, that his parents had a car accident, his childlike mind imagining their funeral at the synagogue. Even when Nettie Fine came over to look after him while his parents worked, “she would not do” because “she was an alien, a trespasser” (323), so he punched her in the stomach.

Nettie explains that “we all die” (324), but that once Lenny has children, the fear of losing parents will cease to matter so much. Remembering Nettie’s calming advice, Lenny reveals his final knowledge: that Nettie died two days after he saw her at the embassy in Rome. Someone unknown sent him messages pretending to be her. And Lenny “never had children” (324).

Lenny defends himself against accusations since the first publication of his and Eunice’s words, which he had written in his diary “with the hope of eventual publication” (325). Besides, he reminds his reader, “the gems in the text are Eunice Park’s GlobalTeens entries” (325). Although Eunice is not a natural writer, one reviewer writes that “her writing is more interesting and more alive than anything else I have read from that illiterate period” (325). Most powerfully, Lenny says, “Eunice Park did not possess the false idea that she was special” (326).

Lenny summarizes his life since the end of the diary. After his parents died, he moved to Canada for 10 years and changed his name to Larry Abraham. The new name has “a touch of leisure suit, a touch of Old Testament” (326). Eventually, he moved to the Tuscan Free State, “a place with less data, less youth” (326), where he can be old and that would be beautiful.

Years later, Lenny attended a speech by “whatever was left of Joshie” (326) at an Italian university. His dechronification procedures caused him to drool; it is inevitable, Joshie says, that “there [is] no way to innovate new technology in time to prevent complications arising from the application of the old” (327). Nature “would not yield” (327) to their procedures. Clients had died. Joshie was fired. Howard Shu turned the company into a mere lifestyle spa. Eunice left Joshie and moved, with a Scotsman, to Aberdeen.

Lenny describes a visit to some friends in Orvieto. These friends have adopted a Russian child, already fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. They discuss what they see as the imminent “end of human life on earth” (328) as the child runs around the house, and Lenny feels depressed. Later in the evening, two young women stop by, one of whom will play Eunice in the Italian adaptation of Lenny’s diaries.

While the actress begins a critique of America, Lenny again thinks privately. He resents the “visceral hatred for a country that had destructed so suddenly, spectacularly, irreversibly” (328). He feels as if he constantly witnesses “this malevolent wake” (328) for the country. He recognizes that he has “begun to grieve” (328) for himself, for his friends, and for his country. Lenny blurts out a gruesome tale of how he, Eunice, and everyone dies. In response, he finds what he needs: “their silence, black and complete” (329).