Review: "I Felt the End Before It Came" by Daniel Allen Cox

I Felt the End Before It Came by Daniel Allen Cox
Published May 2023 via Viking
★★★

Cox's early life was punctuated by rules and prophesies—those of the Jehovah's Witnesses. When he was expelled as a young adult, it was partly devastating and partly a relief; outside the realm of the Witnesses, he was free to fly gay into the world.

This is partly, then, a story of growing up in a cult (his word), partly a story of queer liberation, and partly a fitting together of puzzle pieces of his fiction. Interesting but not really what I was looking for—I've recently discovered that when memoirs start delving into 'and then this experience inspired this novel that I wrote...' my eyes sort of glaze over. It's not a huge part of this book, but (especially since I haven't read any of Cox's fiction and have no real plans to) it was enough to dim my interest. Cox has had an undoubtedly interesting life—I suspect in many ways this is the bare bones of the stories he could tell—but I found myself wishing that he'd hewn more closely to a smaller number of topics, and then perhaps followed up with another work of nonfiction if he'd wanted to explore, e.g., his time in Poland.

Maybe one best suited to readers of Cox's fiction, who might feel the book's reverberations better.