A Review of Sasha Fletcher’s Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World (Vague Spoilers Ahead)
By Kate Hawse
“This was all happening during a period of time people kept referring to as late capitalism, as though this implied it might be over soon.”- Fletcher, pg.187
Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World by Sasha Fletcher is, in its most simple form, an apocalyptic stream of consciousness love story. It tells the story of Sam and Eleanor, a young couple living together in New York trying to make it through life as the apocalypse begins outside their one-bedroom apartment window. However, in Be Here to Love Me, our main couple isn’t fighting off zombies or finding workarounds to an unbreathable atmosphere. Instead, the daily troubles of the protagonists are dead end office jobs, student debt, and politics. The apocalyptic events aren’t lovecraftian threats, but are shockingly normal. That’s because Be Here to Love Me exists to ask its readers a damning question: What if we’re in the apocalypse, and we just can’t bear to admit it?
“Sam’s birthday is the first day of spring and it fucking snowed six inches! The snow didn’t melt until May 1! By Memorial Day it’s going to be ninety degrees!”- Fletcher, pg. 132
Despite what the book’s synopsis will tell you, Fletcher’s imagining of what the apocalypse will be does not involve angels or zombies or a robot uprising. Throughout the novel, Fletcher makes a point to keep all apocalyptic elements grounded. In New York, the novel’s setting, snow falls up to 15 feet while, simultaneously, there’s a threat of a nuke hitting the city that never seems to come. There are secret police who are nabbing people off the street and shooting children while people stand by and do nothing. The US President is less of a person and more of a hivemind of oppression. Within a week, all 15 feet of snow has melted and it's boiling hot in New York. All this to say, every time I came across a paragraph describing the progression of the apocalypse, I felt my stomach drop because although less extreme, I’ve seen many of these things occur on the T.V. or in person. The disquieting apocalypse in Be Here to Love Me is meant to hold a mirror to the world we live in. What’s 15 feet of snow but an exaggeration of the half-foot of snow Toronto just experienced a week after unseasonably warm weather, which then melted within four days? As I kept reading, a sense of dread filled me as I began to hope for the apocalypse to start. That after one of these section breaks, I’d read about the nuclear bomb finally hitting New York or the angels that are constantly hinted at finally arriving to start the Rapture, but none of it ever comes.
“Civil disobedience will only take you so far. Days later, Johnny replied Yes, but one day it will be summer.”- Fletcher, pg. 109
To my dismay, Be Here to Love Me is not an instruction book on how to solve these world-threatening issues, nor does it illustrate a way to cope, but it does provide solace through the story of Sam and Eleanor, our protagonists, as they struggle with these issues. Eleanor works at a cookie-cutter office job with a vague purpose and Sam spends much of the novel searching for a programming job and working around the apartment. It’s all painfully average, and it’s incredibly effective in getting the reader invested in their love story. Throughout the novel, the apocalypse rarely causes new problems for the couple, but exacerbates existing issues that are often the result of systemic inefficiencies we see in the real world like job insecurity and the unstable healthcare system. Sam and Eleanor find many different ways to cope with the end of the world, without stopping it from happening. Sam cooks and plays video games all day. Eleanor copes through work, as it is the only source of income between the two. However, the most prominent coping mechanism the two partake in is storytelling.
“(Fred Hampton) was, unequivocally, the best of us. And we murdered him, unequivocally, in his sleep. So what does this say about America?”- Fletcher, pg. 99
Throughout the novel, author Sasha Fletcher does not make any attempt to hide his political views, which allows for one of his most important philosophies to shine through: the importance of understanding history and its contemporary influence. Many sections of the novel will start off with a history lesson, framed as Sam telling a story to Eleanor. Many of them are factual historical events, many are events that only occur within the world of the novel, and some are about Sam and Eleanor’s love story and how they’ve stuck together during moments of crisis. Through these history lessons, Fletcher paints a picture of a reality where no one event is coincidental. Everything that happens is a result of something else, whether the cause occurred 5 days or 50 years ago. The fictional history that’s displayed in the story also serves as a way of showing how quickly a society can go backwards by connecting the more extreme parts of the setting to real history.
“One day, not today, but soon, real soon, each and every one of those plants are going to need to be watered. And nobody will be able to help them. Even though their very lives depend upon it. So just think about that.” -Fletcher, pg. 123
In Be Here to Love Me, Sasha Fletcher makes the brave choice not attempting to give answers he doesn’t have. Fletcher instead decides to validate the feeling that everything is crumbling apart, and through Sam and Eleanor, asks the reader to continue to care for their loved ones and themselves. We can never really know when the end will come, and because of that, we can’t live our lives paralyzed by fear.