We watch a scene that contemplates flaws balanced with the perfection of a dish, a scene full of pain balanced by the comforts of a meal, a scene of death balanced by the life that continues through a waiting breakfast, scenes of ugliness and complexity and hate balanced simultaneously by beauty and simplicity and love. This argument in the book is primarily subtextual, and the medium he uses to further it is food. Gnade clashes the worst of life against the best of it, showing us that no matter how bad things get, always there is still good to be found, sometimes even in the very same experience. This novella affirms human life in an unusual way. After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different is a raging, ecstatic, troubled book that shows a world of food and a world of life, each inextricable from the other. This is a book of deli sub sandwiches, endless burritos, eggplant parmesan, the magnificence of good sourdough bread, of box brownies and Nacho Cheese Doritos, rolled tacos and the perfect tortilla. Instead Gnade writes about the pain and joy of life and the ways that common, everyday food is there with us at each step.

They celebrate and they battle with their demons and throughout it all they eat. Gnade’s youthful characters sink to hard drugs and deep depression as they navigate life at the end of the last century. Like Proust’s baroque autobiographical fantasies, this is a book rich with details and life. After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different takes place in San Diego taco shops and rundown beach apartments, on the amusement park boardwalk at 3am and in cars bound for Tijuana and drunken glory. Falling somewhere between Trainspotting and Like Water for Chocolate, Adam Gnade’s self-described “food novel” frames each chapter around a meal, and from there moves wild in all directions.

Dine n dash meaning