Parker’s Pages: It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

TW: death, animal death, miscarriage

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It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne De Marcken is an ephemeral collection that feels more like a dream than a story. This novel is simply unforgettable, and it had me in its clutches from the moment I flipped open the first page.

The writing is spectacular and charged, exploring a topic that can sometimes seem taboo. Like the heroine is often told, “none of this is real…some of this is real.” While this story is completely fictional and fantastical, some of it is very real, exploring grief, death, and other hard-hitting topics. This book felt like looking into a mirror, like a reflection of dark thoughts we have all had.

The Evergreen Echo

Anne De Marcken is a multi-faceted artist, with a myriad of interesting art pieces and writing. As a creator, De Marcken explores poetry, visual art, and performance pieces. Her 2020 lyrical collection, The Accident: An Account uses imagery and interactive QR codes to present an account of grief and loss. While both of her prose publications explore grief, death, and loss, her performance art Invisible Ink: Reparations (2017), instead investigates white supremacy and the privilege that comes with being white on the internet. In all these pieces, De Marcken creates a powerful voice. She plays with what is often ineffable or what is uncomfortable to dissect. Her work often exploits boundaries, moving between life and death or safety and peril.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (2024) is a zombie novel but only in the most technical sense. Following an undead heroine who is trying to make sense of her own grief, hunger, and place in the world, De Marcken explores femininity, motherhood, and existential dread. The story begins with our nameless heroine losing a physical part of her body—her arm—and delves into the profound exploration of what it means to lose the self, the body, and humanity. In some ways the heroine is completely unrecognizable, and in other ways, she feels very familiar.

The novel is written as what I would consider a sort of prose-poem, or even something akin to a lyrical essay, meaning that the thoughts of the heroine are delivered at times disjointedly or non-linear, sometimes even in short, choppy sentences. For me, the poetic phrases and stylistic delivery make the heroine’s internal monologue feel all the more real. Later in the story, we are also introduced to a crow who speaks only in random words. “Apple. Arm. Ink. Crown.” or “Dog. Rain. Kelp.” and so on. The meaning is not immediately clear, but even the choice for a character to speak this way lends itself to the overall lyricism of the novel. As readers we consider these words by their sound, rhythm, and feeling, rather than strictly by definition.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne De Marcken (paperback)

The Evergreen Echo

What I like most about the novel is how the main character, while dead, still has to face death, not just as a physical thing that is happening to her (i.e. the decay of her body), but also as an abstract concept in the form of grief. The novel is written almost as a letter, addressed to a ‘you.’ At first, the ‘you’ is mysterious. Is it an old lover? Are they dead or alive? Is it the reader? Is it herself? But then the ‘you’ becomes clearer. As she reveals to another character that she had a miscarriage, the ‘you’ comes into focus as an unborn child. But then the heroine abstracts this loss even further. After finding a dead crow, she binds the creature to her chest and stomach, beginning to speak to it as a ‘you.’ So, while confronting the real loss of her child and the loss of her own life, the speaker also projects and abstracts death, allowing us as readers to see it from many different angles.

As part of my review for this author and novel, I also viewed the mini documentary for her performance piece, Invisible Ink, shot and produced by Tara Champion. I found this piece particularly striking. Debuting in January of 2017, De Marcken’s piece coincided with Trump’s inauguration into office for his first term. This piece involved a long sheet of white paper with words written in invisible ink. The words included messages (both sincere messages and trolling messages) that were sent to Natasha Marin, a Black conceptual artist and poet, in response to her own piece called Reparations. De Marcken’s work slowly unveiled the privileges of white supremacy, using heat to reveal the inked words collaboratively with an audience.

While It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over does not directly address white supremacy, there are some echoes of De Marcken’s other artistic work throughout the novel, including the importance of words and exploration of things that are often taken for granted. Altogether haunting, this novel is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it for anyone who has experienced grief and is open to exploring the many different forms that it takes.