Liam Livings' "And Then That Happened"

[Ulysses]

And Then That Happened

By Liam Livings

Four stars


This isn’t your typical romance. “And Then That Happened” is a beautifully rendered portrait of the death of a long-term relationship and the long, slow birth of a new one. Aside from some irritating structural issues, I found it moving and authentic in tone and in detail. It felt very real, more like a memoir than a novel.

That sense of memoir is not new to this book for Liam Livings. He is also the author of an ongoing series of books, “Best Friend Perfect,” that focus on a young man coming out and making the transition from youth to adulthood. While far more lighthearted in tone, there is heartbreak in those books as well. There are plenty of parallels between this book and those, not the least of which is Dominic’s friend Matt, who is clearly Jo from the “Best Friend” novels. Obviously Livings has drawn from personal experience, and that enriches his work with believability.

“And Then That Happened” was Livings’ first novel, but it could almost be the fast-forward sequel to the “Best Friend” book. It concerns a male nurse, Dominic, in his late twenties, who finds himself ten years into a relationship and realizes that he’s just going through the motions.

“The pressure to put on a shiny happy face and enjoy yourself became larger than anything else in the room.”

And then by chance he meets another male nurse, Gabe, and suddenly the futility of his relationship becomes all too apparent.

A sad story in many ways, “And Then That Happened” is not at all melodramatic. There are no bad guys, least of all Dominic’s partner, Luke. The story is thoughtful and honest in its attempt to analyze what makes “happiness” and the ways we—gay men, but really everyone—continue to accommodate in little ways until we find ourselves stranded and unable to move forward.

The narrative is not just about Dominic’s relationship with Luke or his friendship with Gabe. It is about his whole history with Luke—from college to surviving the horrors of AIDS, to dealing with parents and difficult friends and the constant threat of depression. Livings tackles the full, complicated truth of a young man’s life and flinches at nothing.

I finished reading this book, rather compulsively, on my own 39th anniversary with a husband, who, like Gabe, I met in university. There is very little in this rather younger British man’s life that didn’t resonate in some way with my own American version of that life. It made me ponder the fact that the same ingredients don’t always lead to the same results. As much as we might wish it to be so, people are not predictable; we cannot fully control what happens in our lives or what our reactions will be to those events.

Livings’ use of flashbacks was sometimes confusing, and there are moments of unintended discontinuity that were puzzling, but the large landscape he paints of Dominic’s journey from false happiness to true happiness is quietly harrowing and, it seems to me, terribly true.

I suspect this book will have a little trouble getting traction in the M/M romance world, because it bravely avoids all of the formulae; it is the sort of book I’d love to see catch on in the mainstream press (with some strict editorial input). Anyone who thinks gay men can’t teach the world about marriage ought to read this.