I thought my father was unbreakable. But he was too proud to entrust anyone with his suffering

Will Boast had lost his mother to a brain tumour and his brother to a car crash by the time he was 19. In this extract from his moving memoir Epilogue, he recalls how his father began to drink himself to death



• Q&A with Will Boast

For years I tried to write this story – Mom, Rory, Dad, discovering my half-brothers – as fiction. I finally showed the manuscript to a writer friend. If you put all that in, she said, no one will believe it. Life doesn’t care if the plot feels clumsy.

My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed.

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