One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper January-February 17, 2013 I am a fan of Tropper. Light-hearted, yet sometimes with deep underlying messages, his books really lend themselves to audio. This one saw me through a drive down to Coshocton and back; four hours total, somehow making the trip a little more bearable (we all know I hate road trips and tend to whine a lot). Silver is a washed-up musician; divorced, shitty father, and all-around failure in his own mind. When his valedictorian daughter confides her pregnancy in him, his attempt to be a good father is by taking her to the abortion clinic. While in the waiting room, he suffers a mini stroke and soon finds out that he has an aneurysm in need of immediate repair – the repair to be performed by his ex-wife's financé. Being the loser he claims to be, he decides against the lifesaving operation and begins "waiting to die" by living in the moment and trying to become a better man. His entire family is exasperated and each makes an attempt to prove that life is still worth living. Poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, One Last Thing is the easy kind of reading I look forward to. “We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.” * * * * *