David Schwinghammer’s Reviews > The Last Chairlift > Status Update

Adam has a thing for his friend Em. Mr. Barlow, his old teacher, accuses him of fictionalizing their relationship.: "You're imagining that you and Em are a couple, that you're already together--this is how you look at her," he said.

Most likely Em has just lost her true love, Nora.

Adam has a thing for Em, one of the women he's been hanging with. He does hint that Em may have been more interested in Nora. He refers to Nora, who recently died, as the love of Em's life. Em has told him to quit looking at her "like that".

Nora is shot at the Gallows, where she sometimes performs. The shooter kills himself.

An avalanche kills the Little Barlows. The snowshoer had seen "a kind of crazy rapture, or at least relief on their frozen faces. She's seen (or had imagined) "the intense joy or at least relief" parents feel when they know their children will outlive them.

Irving addresses the AIDS epidemic through one of his minor characters.

Bob hope jokes about AIDS at the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. It was particularly risqué.

There's a fellow writer in line after Adam's reading. Her name is Wilson. He imagines having sex with her.

Adam's friends, Nora and Em, do routines at a performance venue called the Gallows. It was getting harder to be funny about anything already at the end of the 1970's. And they called themselves Two Dykes, One Who Talks.

Adam's mother would stand close to the person she was talking to and hold his or her wrists.

The kindergarten man's sister sends him back to preschool, where she thinks his mental development stopped. Irving must have been sniffing glue when he wrote this stuff. How am I still reading It?