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The Last Thing I'll Ever Write
A full-length debut on communication, intimacy, and despair as told through poetry, dreamscapes, and scenes from an existential sitcom, Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob.
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Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is like Prometheus Unbound rewritten by Samuel Beckett—a fever dream about a desperate search for meaning and connection in a world defined by violence and solitude. Alternating between satirical realism and mystic abstraction, between bawdy humor and lyrical solemnity, Lauver playfully experiments with competing apocalypses in this five-act closet drama.
— Carrie Shanafelt, Professor of Humanities
This play invites us to fall into a dream logic bordering on Lynchian esotericism. Cutting between moments and scenes, characters are undefined, then defined, then obliterated. Religion cannot help a believer cope with the heaviness of depression, yet human intimacy and connection feel equally absurd in moments of hopelessness. Desperate to communicate, The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write (Part One) is an urgent existential plea in the face of contemporary despair.
—Joshua Young, author of Psalms for the Wreckage
Viscerally bare and hauntingly vulnerable, The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is every inch a liminal space you’ll want to spend the rest of your life wrestling with, and every bit an embodiment of why we admire the nostalgia within ourselves. As much as it is wise, it is young. As much as it is yearning, it is at peace. Adam Lauver's voice is one so inviting and so honest, you won't want anyone else to confront and caress oblivion.
— Ayla Sullivan, playwright & Denver Youth Poet Laureate
A play & a dream journal, whimsical & insightful, filled with social horrors & delights, The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write (Part One) is a wild ride of dialectics, all clamoring to speak. Concepts, archetypes, forces of nature, gods, and shapes work through gestures of intentionality & order, unified by the need to tell of—to make some sense of—our disarray. Adam Lauver buries insight in the fertile dirt of silliness, from which sprouts joy & wonder.
—Mathias Svalina, author of Wastoid & the Dream Delivery Service
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Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is like Prometheus Unbound rewritten by Samuel Beckett—a fever dream about a desperate search for meaning and connection in a world defined by violence and solitude. Alternating between satirical realism and mystic abstraction, between bawdy humor and lyrical solemnity, Lauver playfully experiments with competing apocalypses in this five-act closet drama.
— Carrie Shanafelt, Professor of Humanities
This play invites us to fall into a dream logic bordering on Lynchian esotericism. Cutting between moments and scenes, characters are undefined, then defined, then obliterated. Religion cannot help a believer cope with the heaviness of depression, yet human intimacy and connection feel equally absurd in moments of hopelessness. Desperate to communicate, The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write (Part One) is an urgent existential plea in the face of contemporary despair.
—Joshua Young, author of Psalms for the Wreckage
Viscerally bare and hauntingly vulnerable, The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is every inch a liminal space you’ll want to spend the rest of your life wrestling with, and every bit an embodiment of why we admire the nostalgia within ourselves. As much as it is wise, it is young. As much as it is yearning, it is at peace. Adam Lauver's voice is one so inviting and so honest, you won't want anyone else to confront and caress oblivion.
— Ayla Sullivan, playwright & Denver Youth Poet Laureate
A play & a dream journal, whimsical & insightful, filled with social horrors & delights, The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write (Part One) is a wild ride of dialectics, all clamoring to speak. Concepts, archetypes, forces of nature, gods, and shapes work through gestures of intentionality & order, unified by the need to tell of—to make some sense of—our disarray. Adam Lauver buries insight in the fertile dirt of silliness, from which sprouts joy & wonder.
—Mathias Svalina, author of Wastoid & the Dream Delivery Service
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
1 person is currently reading
554 people want to read
About the author
Adam Lauver
3 books25 followersAdam Lauver is an actor, writer, and comedian. His first book, an experimental play titled The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One), was published by Plays Inverse Press in January 2019. Later in 2019 he wrote and starred in The Podney Dangercast, a 40-minute audio drama about Rodney Dangerfield. In 2020, with Helpful Goat Gaming, he produced, edited, and performed in Dom & Dragons, a Dungeons & Dragons podcast featuring actor Dominic Monaghan. Adam is a top Google result for "man falls in shower gif." He is prouder of that than you might think.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 3, 2019
Hot damn. A mother fucking apocalypse of the mind told in three distinct parts, within five wickedly deceiving acts. Lauver has cleverly placed you smack in the middle of this bizarre yet captivating dreamscape of broken characters in the midst of their own mini existential crises - what meaning lies within our dreams? what does it mean to "be"? to what lengths would we go to unbreak what is broken within us? - and a pretty badass game of chess taking place between a young kid and Eleanor Rosevelt outside of a quickmart that plays out through eternity.
(one of my Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2019: https://bit.ly/2SHKV5L)
(one of my Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2019: https://bit.ly/2SHKV5L)
February 20, 2019
This book is challenging--it's cerebral, fragmented, contradictory, and metafictional. It vacillates between ironic and sincere so often and so quickly that it feels like a new word should be invented to describe its tone. It made me think about things that fiction normally does not make me think about, namely: the problem of communication. I spend a lot of time reading fiction and thinking about the problem of suffering. But this book seems to argue that the root of suffering is the innate need/compulsion to communicate. "The sublime stands desolate on the other side of language." This book feels strangely Buddhist. Oh by the way it's also very fun to read, filled with nonsense (and I mean that in the most positive way).
January 28, 2019
As soon as this arrived in the mail, I plucked it out of my husband's hands and read it immediately, in one sitting. My brain melted a little, and I wanted to laugh and cry so I did both.
October 20, 2020
the other reviews are right; this book is like, existential exfoliation for the soul, or something. i’ll leave metaphors to the author—just read it, right now.
July 21, 2025
Right when you think it's already a mindf*ck, the mind f*cks.
This is a brilliant, challenging, full hearted and funny play written by somebody I follow on Letterboxd. And what a follow it was.
I wrote an essay for a class this past term trying to say something, anything, but I really struggled. I was trying to write about gender and meat paradox, and ended up struggling not to say diet=gender=diet=gender. It's like I had created an inescapable logical loop, where the boundaries of one concept felt too arbitrary to distinguish from the other. They may have been the writings of a madman. I had found the psychological literature to be missing something important, and so I fumbled around in cognitive polyphasia and social representations theory discourse, and then what I ultimately ended up saying was the only thing I felt I could say, which was that because all communicable knowledge is dialogic and contextual, the field of psychology is slop. Well, the professor had a PhD in psychology, so writing this was a stupid stupid route, but I genuinely couldn't figure out how to say anything else that expressed how I understood the literature I'd read - I really tried. So I get the paper back, and the pages are absolutely covered with red pen, over and over and over saying "what does this mean?" "what?" "you need to explain." "???" They seemed angry to me, and it was clear that they had zero clue what I was saying, at all. The only other feedback besides confusion that they gave was to say that I "seemed biased," and I was like, yeah - exactly! Then at the end of the paper, 85%? What the hell? How do you give somebody an 85% for something that you can't make sense of at all? Trust? Forgiveness? Intimidation? Lust?
Anyways... this book made me think about that, the struggle and desire to communicate something true or not.
This is a brilliant, challenging, full hearted and funny play written by somebody I follow on Letterboxd. And what a follow it was.
I wrote an essay for a class this past term trying to say something, anything, but I really struggled. I was trying to write about gender and meat paradox, and ended up struggling not to say diet=gender=diet=gender. It's like I had created an inescapable logical loop, where the boundaries of one concept felt too arbitrary to distinguish from the other. They may have been the writings of a madman. I had found the psychological literature to be missing something important, and so I fumbled around in cognitive polyphasia and social representations theory discourse, and then what I ultimately ended up saying was the only thing I felt I could say, which was that because all communicable knowledge is dialogic and contextual, the field of psychology is slop. Well, the professor had a PhD in psychology, so writing this was a stupid stupid route, but I genuinely couldn't figure out how to say anything else that expressed how I understood the literature I'd read - I really tried. So I get the paper back, and the pages are absolutely covered with red pen, over and over and over saying "what does this mean?" "what?" "you need to explain." "???" They seemed angry to me, and it was clear that they had zero clue what I was saying, at all. The only other feedback besides confusion that they gave was to say that I "seemed biased," and I was like, yeah - exactly! Then at the end of the paper, 85%? What the hell? How do you give somebody an 85% for something that you can't make sense of at all? Trust? Forgiveness? Intimidation? Lust?
Anyways... this book made me think about that, the struggle and desire to communicate something true or not.
February 28, 2019
This book shook me to my core on so many levels. I have lived almost 40 years of my life thinking so many secret thoughts and this book yanked them all out into the sunlight. I feel rejuvenated. This book has revealed skin's freshest layer. I will walk in this new world with the knowledge that I'm not alone and that the apocolyse is not something to fear but to embrace like a prodigal son. Also that cover art makes my heart happy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 13, 2020
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Adam Lauver certainly has! The head-scratching and introspective themes of “The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write (Part One)” (still get a kick out of that title!) are exactly what the world needs right now.
August 24, 2019
Oh boy! I'm going to do something I normally don't. Here is the official description for this story:
"Drama. Poetry. A full-length debut on communication, intimacy, and despair as told through poetry, dreamscapes, and scenes from an existential sitcom, Adam Lauver's THE LAST THING I'LL EVER WRITE (PART ONE) will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob."
I'm posting the official description because it does such a good job of describing the ride that this text is. One part poetry/ one part play/one part book..this story gives you everything.
I want to read more things like this. This 3 in one story is a giant metafictional bandaid we are all looking for but didn't know we needed. This book is miracle grow for your brain. This book is existential and sincere and ironic and full of love and pain and just so utterly human. This is a gentle reminder that none of us are alone.
"Drama. Poetry. A full-length debut on communication, intimacy, and despair as told through poetry, dreamscapes, and scenes from an existential sitcom, Adam Lauver's THE LAST THING I'LL EVER WRITE (PART ONE) will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob."
I'm posting the official description because it does such a good job of describing the ride that this text is. One part poetry/ one part play/one part book..this story gives you everything.
I want to read more things like this. This 3 in one story is a giant metafictional bandaid we are all looking for but didn't know we needed. This book is miracle grow for your brain. This book is existential and sincere and ironic and full of love and pain and just so utterly human. This is a gentle reminder that none of us are alone.
"I tug at the corners of the fabric of the universe, and where it bunches and folds is where I'll create my greatest triumph."
March 18, 2020
I'm not sure, even after reading this twice, that I understand everything Lauver is doing here, but it is fascinating and weird and energized and how can you not love it when the title is this title?
One spot that really amazed me: Lauver lists 46 new words/phrases in the etymology of the Greek word for ἀποκάλυψις (apocalypse, if I'm correct). Lots about language, rhetoric, fun with names (Neil Simonier!), quotes from Derrida AND Nina Simone.
Looking forward to Lauver's next book!
One spot that really amazed me: Lauver lists 46 new words/phrases in the etymology of the Greek word for ἀποκάλυψις (apocalypse, if I'm correct). Lots about language, rhetoric, fun with names (Neil Simonier!), quotes from Derrida AND Nina Simone.
Looking forward to Lauver's next book!
August 13, 2019
How to laugh and cry on the same page. This is a twisted sitcom, a hysterical identity crises, a heartbreaking earthquake of communication skills (and dinosaurs). Queue the laughter. Queue the rainfall.
January 12, 2020
Wow, I finished it and had an impulse to sit outside, ponder life under the blue skies, and maybe try to write some poetry or something. Instead I took a shower and went to get some tacos, but damn if I wasn't inspired while I did that.
April 18, 2021
only rating and reviewing this because i didn't like the odd number of ratings and reviews lolol.
that being said, this is definitely the best thing i'll ever write.
(...part one)
that being said, this is definitely the best thing i'll ever write.
(...part one)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 16, 2022
The narrator is something of a cosmic horror. Everything I've read by this press (Plays Inverse) is incredible. Highly recommend this one.
May 13, 2020
It's difficult to describe WHAT this... book? play? is. I can say that I felt frighteningly small and also cosmically important while reading. I laughed, gasped, and left with a million questions and fun thoughts to bounce around in my head. A delightful, quick read that will always be worth turning back to.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews