Sometimes the beginning of everything sneaks up on you when you least expect it.
I read this once in a Gloria Diamond novel, the final novel she would ever publish before her death. It was a much-anticipated prequel to her biggest bestselling novel of all time, Love at the End of the World. Love in the Beginning of Time was the love story of the two mothers of the original protagonists from Love at the End of the World. Thirty-five years before the asteroid hit, they met on the beach in Santa Monica and started a torrid summer affair that would secretly span decades, right up until the asteroid killed them both.
It would be the first—and only—Gloria Diamond novel that did not have a happy ending. And critics would be mixed over whether the Queen of Romance could truly be the queen if the romance didn’t end happily. But the book sold three million copies worldwide, and the movie (on which I was an executive producer) became a blockbuster success.
Truth be told, it wasn’t the ending that made me tear up. I didn’t make it past the dedication before I started sobbing, as it simply read, For the one and only B.
Sometimes, even years later, I would marvel at my life, at my thriving career, at my twins, at my adorably nerdy and sexy husband, and I would think that this was the truest line that Gloria had ever written: The beginning of everything really did sneak up on you when you least expected it.
The supporting role that I would go on to take after I quit Diamond in the Rough would end up winning me a Golden Globe, which then spiraled into a leading role in a feature film that would make me a household name. I would sell my house in Santa Monica before I turned forty and move outside of Seattle with Will where daily life was quieter. And then when the twins were born, two weeks after my forty-first birthday, I would take a year off from acting before Liza would find me a role in a long-running series that shot in Vancouver, not too far from home, and that would eventually win me an Emmy. (Liza would later quip that she could’ve made me an EGOT winner if only I’d ever learned how to sing. Sadly, I had not inherited Gaitlin’s perfect pitch.)
Sometimes I thought about how my life would’ve turned out differently, if all the secrets of the past hadn’t cast so many long shadows on all of our lives. Mare, Max, my mother. But then everything I knew about them now made me wonder if maybe endings were really just new beginnings in disguise.
I ran this thought by Gloria once, in her later years, after the cancer made her mostly bedridden, and she insisted Will or I bring the twins over at least once a week to cheer her up. They were tweens by then, though, and bringing them over meant that after a quick hello, they sat on their phones eating snacks in her kitchen, while I sat and talked with Gloria at her bedside by myself.
“Beginnings and endings are drastically different,” she snapped back at me, when I posed the question. “Maybe you should leave the writing to me?”
She was no longer writing by then of course, but I smiled at her and nodded. Over her later years, she loved telling the story in every interview she did of how the best thing to come out of the massive flop that was her biopic was her future daughter-in-law. (Diamond in the Rough might’ve tanked at the box office, but at least she got grandkids out of it!)
“Beginnings,” she clarified, “are the easy part. Endings are the hardest to get right.” She paused and motioned for me to hand her her diamond-studded water cup from the nightstand. I carefully passed it over to her, and she took a slow sip through the metal straw before handing it back to me. “It’s all about what you do in the middle that counts,” she added. “You have to earn the happy ending, Amelia. You need to work really hard to get all those small moments in the middle exactly right.” She grabbed on tightly to my hand and squeezed for emphasis.
And that’s what I would remember, even years later, after Gloria was gone. That would stay with me, more than any line in any of her books. More than anything that had happened in her real (or pretend) story.
I would remember the way she reached for my hand as she spoke that afternoon, the way she held on to me, the way she smiled just a little when she talked about the small moments in the middle. As if somehow me knowing her, talking to her just like that, made me a part of her eventual happy ending. And maybe it made her a part of mine too.