From Not Enough to Ever After, by G. Garrison

[Ulysses]

From Not Enough to Ever After
By G. Garrison
Published by the author, 2025
Five stars

G. Garrison’s “From Never Enough to Ever After” is a lovely read. There’s a great deal of carefully calibrated emotion in the story, which I confess struck me as something like an After School Special, but one which kept my eyes wet a lot of the time. This is the sort of story that can feel obvious and heavy-handed. Garrison makes it sing, and plucks every emotional chord in your heart.

At the center of the romance are two young men: Ben Diaz and Oliver Tompson. Ben is just twenty, while Ollie is twenty-three. They’ve had very different life experiences, but both bring with them complicated stories that emerge to drive the narrative and develop the characters.

Ben and Ollie live in the same shabby old apartment building on the edge of campus in a college town. Ben is a student while Ollie is a brand-new English teacher at the local high school. The attraction is pretty much instant, but that just sets up all the frustration we feel as roadblocks are thrown in the path of happiness. Ben has moved into a two-bedroom apartment with his four siblings: his twin sister Susie, who is the reason for their move. She has a full scholarship to the local college and is be a full-time student. Two teenage siblings, Marcus and Ophelia (called Opie) and a six-year-old named Maisie are under Ben’s legal guardianship, which he obtained at the age of eighteen. Maisie is very smart, but has cerebral palsy and needs special education arrangements. These kids are alone because their grandmother, who was caring for all of them, died a couple of years earlier. Ben works full time, takes courses online, and manages everything like a superhuman.

Ollie seems to have a simpler story, but it depends on your viewpoint. He’s very close to his sister Georgia, who is a nurse; but there is also a mother here. Her story adds its own heartbreak.

The author does a beautiful job of playing out the emotional threads in the narrative; deftly weaving them all into the interconnected stories of sibling love, fear of loss, and past trauma. Ben is openly gay, but has never had time to act on it. Ollie is also gay, but is still closeted and afraid of being identified as gay. Little by little the backstories are revealed, which simply adds to both the texture and the emotional anxiety.

There are quite a few secondary characters here who play important roles as the story unfolds. They’re fantastic, and funny, and crucial. The old liberal phrase, “it takes a village” came to mind more than once as I read this. An important aspect of this book is that it entirely a story of goodness and kindness. I kept waiting for bad people to appear, and while bad things have happened in the past, the author has chosen to focus on the good—both actual and potential.

Our world is full of meanness and strife right now, especially from the people we generally trust to give us the opposite. That’s partly why this book meant so much to me, why it resonated so consistently. It’s a great story, but an important message as well.