Epilogue

Anne Roiphe, author of 15 books including Up the Sandbox and Fruitful, asks in her moving memoir, Epilogue: "If life is a cabaret shouldn't there always be another act, at least until there isn't?" But having been "coupled" for almost 40 years, when her husband, Herman, unexpectedly collapses and dies in the lobby of their…

In most biographies, an epilogue provides the story of what happens after the subject of the book has died or somehow left the scene. It’s a wrapping up, a life-after-life afterthought.

Will Boast, whose Power Ballads: Stories (2011) won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, cannily reverses this usual order by turning the epilogue into the…