The Whirlwind of Beginning and End: A Review of Our Last Blue Moon

I knew how the story ended before I picked up Our Last Blue Moon—the short version, at least. Alan Cheuse, a widely published author, fiction professor at George Mason University’s MFA program, and the longtime “Voice of Books” on NPR’s All Things Considered, died suddenly and tragically in 2015. In the years following his death, I’ve met Kris O’Shee a couple of times at various literary events in the Washington D.C. area. People at these events who knew Kris, who knew who she was, would tell me, in a low voice like the ones usually reserved for funerals, “That’s Alan’s widow.” The gravity of his loss was clear in their furtive glances, their stares, their whispers—the awkward sympathetic motions made by people struggling with how to deal with a loss.

I never met Alan. I came to Fairfax, Virginia, and the graduate creative writing program where he taught four years after his passing. Still, though, his presence looms large. The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, founded at George Mason University soon after his passing, constantly puts out great work bringing the work of international writers and translators to a broader audience. They constantly honor Alan’s lifelong passion, as the son of a Russian immigrant father, for gaining experiences and wisdom to broaden his own cultural understanding. Faculty and alumni who knew him talk about him often, remembering their time with him fondly and continuing to share stories, like the way he always kept chocolate in his desk at school, just in case somebody came by and needed a pick me up. Even though Alan has been gone for years now, and the students currently working through the program never met him, he is still very much a part of our educations.

It is because Alan’s spirit and memory permeates every aspect of the writing program at George Mason that I was so excited to pick up Kris’s book. In addition to his teaching and his kindness, one thing that people always talk about is how much Alan and Kris loved each other. Opening Our Last Blue Moon was like stepping into a fairytale, even though I knew the ending was anything but a happily ever after.

From the first chapter, I was swept away. Kris has a skill in writing that many writers practice their entire careers to achieve and that some never master; her writing is genuine, undramatized, brutally, breathlessly real. The craft elements we learn in formal writing courses— narrative distance, pacing, emotional balance—all seem to come naturally to Kris, like she’s picked up these skills through osmosis over decades of spending much of her social time in Alan’s circle of writer friends. She invites you warmly and completely into her life, her story, creating a feeling of a personal relationship with her, one where calling her Ms. O’Shee feels too formal and cold. When Kris starts telling the story, there is no need to imagine how she must have felt picking up the phone to learn her husband had been in an accident. It bleeds through the page.

This raw authenticity never lets up through the whole book. In both the happiest and most tragic moments, Kris manages to walk the line between putting enough power behind her words to bring the reader into the room with her without falling into the melodrama one might anticipate of a debut author. The moment Kris and Alan meet, their first kiss, their first shared apartment in Washington D.C., their final conversation; all of it is imbued with life and careful finesse.

The structure of the book, too, is a testament to how deep their connection went. Oscillating in time, mostly between the week they first met and the final weeks of Alan’s life, Kris shares their picturesque love-at-almost-first-sight meeting at an artist’s retreat right alongside the moments where their love was at its most intense. Kris did not have to convince me of their bond; I felt it from the way she wrote, the words Alan wrote that she chose to share again within her own work, and the moments she decided to share with the world. Theirs was a romance that needed no evidence, no verification from the world. In this way, Our Last Blue Moon is unlike any love story I have ever read.

Ultimately, I walked away from this book wanting to sit down and have a conversation with Kris O’Shee. I wanted to hear more of her stories, learn more of her life and her life with Alan, and to become her friend. The way she tells her story made me feel like I had already made a significant step toward friendship, toward sipping sweet tea on her screened-in Washington D.C. porch chatting and gossiping like old friends. I don’t know that I’ve ever had such a strong wish to really know an author after reading their work, but Kris made that desire encompass me. Her writing is an open invitation into her world, her love, her grief, an experience I found myself not wanting to part with. So, in lieu of tea on her porch, I have recommended this book to anybody I can—young and old, writers and nonwriters, romance lovers and memoir enthusiasts alike—urging them to get a copy as soon as possible so they, too, can feel as I have. While I wait, I’ll just pick up the book and start again.