A Quixotically Escapist 2020 AU: Casey McQuiston’s ‘One Last Stop’

“Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, if it makes people happy, if it makes me happy.”

So this book is just further evidence to illustrate the fundamental law of the universe that Casey McQuiston is an instant auto-buy, and it actually makes me feel slightly inebriated to think that its first print run in the US alone is 250,000 copies. Potentially 250,000 people reading This Book, who might then pass it on to hundreds of thousands more. The magnitude of that.

“There’s always been a map in August’s head of how things are supposed to be. Her whole life, she managed the noise and buzz and creeping dread in her brain by mapping things out, telling herself that if she looked hard enough, she’d find an explanation for everything. But here they are, looking at each other across the steady delineation of things August understands, watching the line blur.”

What I also love so viscerally about a CMcQ book is that they’re always so stuffed with cultural and historical context, which is also why they run long, but I wouldn’t lose a single page. They’re just suffused with such a rich texture of sensory detail, of references, tributes, and teasers. Like wee springboards for younglings to then go and immerse themselves in queer history, following the breadcrumbs, filling in the repressed blanks like Alex does in Red, White & Royal Blue… Paris is Burning, ball culture, bicon Eleanor Roosevelt, the Laws of Illinois 1961, the White Night Riot, David Wojnarowicz, pink triangles, Martha Shelley, UpStairs Lounge, Stormé DeLarverie….

“You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same. It’s always the same.”

August was born in 1996. She has no father. She has no compass. She has a thorny past that’s twisted into a barricade around her like Aurora’s castle and the approachability of a horror frog. She trains herself to trust no one, to ensconce her heart in an adamantine shield, to cold-shoulder connection and shun affection. I never stood a chance with this book. It had me from the roommate ad taped to a trash can inside a Brooklyn diner scribbled with the words “must be queer & trans friendly”. That is to say… page 1.

It’s a story of maps (from subway to journey of self-discovery to slow-burn courtship to time itself), of roots, identity, belonging, believing, self-worth, self-love, community, courage…

“Sometimes it feels like there are three Augusts—one born hopeful, one who learned how to pick locks, and one who moved to New York alone—all sticking out knife blades and tripping one another to get to the front of the line.”

From August and Jane/Biyu to Niko, Myla, Wes, and Isaiah to Lucie, Winfield, and Jerry to Annie Depressant, Sara Tonin, and Bomb Bumboclaat, it also has quite possibly my favourite cast of characters maybe ever, yet again demonstrating the evergreen superiority of found family in the loftiest tier of narrative tropes. (And there was much chuckling at the recurring use of “ponytail holder” for “bobble”. Americans.)

“Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought it would stand out, singular and crystallised, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They’re so easy to lose.”

It’s also become, like RW&RB was in the wake of 2016, another quixotically escapist AU, this time for the relentless Charybdis of 2020.

I turned the final page hours after the announcement of yet another national lockdown feeling not the familiar cold and callous despondency but rather soul-soothing forever warmth.

The power of Casey McQuiston.

Long may their foot remain on our necks, their pen dashing across our souls, their words ensconcing our deep benthic darkness in bright improbable light.

“She met Jane, and now she wants a home, one she’s made for herself, one nobody can take away because it lives in her like a funny little glass terrarium filled with growing plants and shiny rocks and tiny lopsided statues, warm with penthouse views of Myla’s paint-stained hands and Niko’s sly smile and Wes’s freckly nose. She wants somewhere to belong, things that hold the shape of her body even when she’s not touching them, a place and a purpose and a happy, familiar routine. She wants to be happy. To be well.”