"The Ends of Things"

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, created by Oscar-winning writer Tom McCarthy and starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Chwialkowska holds a BA in literature from Yale.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Ends of Things, her first novel, and reported the following:

On page 69 of the paperback, Laura describes her former best friend Chloe’s curated social media presence, and this touches on one of my novel’s key themes—appearance vs reality. The novel is concerned with how things look vs how things really are, what we think we are supposed to want from life vs what we really want. Social media allows Chloe to present an image of herself that is inauthentic, and this foments in Laura a lot of anxiety. When Laura learns that Diana, the solo female traveler that she becomes obsessed with, has no social media presence at all, it underscores Laura’s internal struggle—the yearning to abide by social norms in order to belong (like Chloe) vs the desire to step outside of those norms and be unconstrained and free (like Diana).

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--Marshal Zeringue