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"  &amp;quot;I ask myself, too, if I need answers to these question; are there any words that will tell me what I want to know?&amp;quot; Why she wrote the last line: You might wonder why I&amp;#039;m giving away the end of my story. Here&amp;#039;s my confession: I read the last line of a book before I read the first.  Why is this? Psych 101 says it&amp;#039;s a control thing. I have to know the ending in order to feel in control of my reading experience. Or, maybe it&amp;#039;s some atavistic terror response to the possibility of change. Or maybe, like a child, I just can&amp;#039;t wait open my presents. To be brutal with myself, I&amp;#039;d say that these explanations are somewhat accurate. To be fair to myself, I&amp;#039;d say they do not tell the entire story.  I think I read the final sentence because it is in those words that I feel the author is not simply telling me the end of the story (and often, the final words reveal little about the story itself) but that the author is telling me something about a feeling he or she carried with him or her through the long, sometimes arduous journey of telling a novel. The last line is not so much a summation of a story of the invented characters as it is the summation of the author&amp;#039;s experience with the work. In a piece of writing, every move an author makes is a deliberate choice. We make choices about voice, about narrative distance, about what information to include or delete. We make choices about whether we view a scene as a landscape or a close-up. In the best novels, the choices are seamless, and the reader is relatively unaware of these authorial movements. But no choice is more overt, more naked, than that of what words we use to end a piece. The last lines are how we say goodbye not just to our characters, but to our readers.  The line doesn&amp;#039;t tell you much about what happened in the book except that, perhaps, there is some knowledge that the narrator is and has been searching for. As endings go, it&amp;#039;s a pretty open ended one. And that was my intention. I ended the novel with a question, because the idea of an unanswered question sums up a lot about what I think about my characters&amp;#039; particular story, what I think about novel writing in general, and, as it turns out, what I think about life. As storytellers, we&amp;#039;re often taught to think about resolution. We are encouraged to think about how people grow and change as a result of circumstances we set into motion. We&amp;#039;re told that readers want to feel a sense of &amp;quot;closure.&amp;quot; Resolution, closure, growth, and change. These are concepts drummed into us by writing teachers and books about writing. They are the insistent, stubborn backbeat of our writing experience. I rebel against resolution, closure, growth and change. I don&amp;#039;t actually believe that stories resolve, or that people grow and change in enormous, life altering ways. I believe stories go on, and that people move a little to the left or the right, or shift their gazes so their point of view changes just enough to make them recognize that what they thought they knew of their lives was only partial knowledge. In other words, a story tells us how much more of the human story there is left to tell. When I think of endings of stories or novels, I think about an opening up, not a closing down. I&amp;#039;m not looking for a reader to feel I have tidied up a mess I have made. Certain fundamental questions ought to be answered: who did what to whom, for instance. But how about the why? Should the why of it all really have a final answer? I don&amp;#039;t want the reader to walk away from a book or a story of mine feeling that he or she is done with it. I want to give them what I get from books I love: I want readers to shut the book and for the story to continue in their minds, for the deeper questions of why we behave the way we do to linger. I want to leave them with questions -- unanswered and maybe unanswerable questions. I suppose that I feel that what fiction can do best is to expose these questions and cause people to wonder more about the human condition, not less.  In The God of War, a twelve-year old boy is saddled with the responsibility for his mentally disabled brother. Rebelling against this burden, he struggles to shirk off his childhood dutifulness and define himself as separate from his family. His efforts propel him into a dangerous world with lethal consequence. At the end of the novel, he is faced with the possibility of revealing a long held secret and of asking the essential questions that have been dogging him his entire life. Writing the book, I played around with his different choices, spun out scenarios based on whether he does or does not reveal what he knows. The urge to have all the information out in the open was strong. But the neatness it would have provided -- well, that was neither my experience of the novel nor what I felt was essential about my characters&amp;#039; experiences. The messiness of not asking that final question, of leaving it open felt truer to me, not because I wanted to tease the reader, (the reader knows the truth, in fact) but because I wanted to say that perhaps any answer gives a false sense of closure to the characters and to the reader both. After the journey of a novel, both reading one and writing one, the answer is beside the point. About the author: Marisa Silver&amp;#039;s next novel, The God of War, will be out in April 2008 from Simon and Schuster. Her collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise, was published by Norton in 2001, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She published her first novel, No Direction Home, in 2005. As told to Anya Yurchyshyn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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