Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs

Overview
William S. Burroughs’ Last Words gathers the author’s final journal entries from 1996–1997, written in Lawrence, Kansas, and assembled after his death by his longtime friend and executor James Grauerholz. The book offers a candid, fragmentary self-portrait of the Beat elder in his last years: daily logs, dreams, memories, riffs, aphorisms, and flashes of the cut-up sensibility, all orbiting the central subjects of aging, addiction, friendship, cats, art, and mortality. Rather than a continuous narrative, it is a running ledger of consciousness, laconic and searching, bleakly funny and unexpectedly tender, ending only days before his death in August 1997.

Daily life and setting
The Lawrence entries show a disciplined routine and a small, precise radius: feeding and mourning beloved cats, target practice and “shotgun painting,” visits with neighbors and friends, errands in town, readings and public appearances, and a continuing engagement with world news filtered through Burroughs’ lifelong suspicion of control systems. He tracks medications and aches of an aging body, notes marijuana’s effects, and keeps careful account of sleep patterns and dreams. The Midwest setting, so different from Tangier or New York, becomes a quiet stage on which memory and habit play out, a place where a notorious literary renegade lives almost monkishly, taking the measure of each day.

Themes
Mortality is the prevailing undertone. Burroughs faces the diminishing horizon without melodrama, visiting funerals, reading obituaries, watching friends sicken and die, and bracing himself for his own departure. Grief for Allen Ginsberg’s death in 1997 runs through the pages, as do recollections of earlier companions, Kerouac, Huncke, and the long shadow of Joan Vollmer’s death in Mexico. He revisits old obsessions: the “ugly spirit” of possession, the idea of word-as-virus, and the bardo states of Tibetan lore. Love, a concept he had long kept at ironic distance, emerges as a late revelation; one of his final entries distills it starkly: “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.” The tenderness he extends to animals, the fidelity to friends, and the dry, scrimshawed humor temper the harsher notes of paranoia and anger at political hypocrisy and the drug war.

Voice and form
The prose alternates between notebook brevity and incantatory runs. Telegraphic sentences, dream shards, and collage-like juxtapositions sit alongside clear, lucid observations of weather, pain, hunger, and memory. The rhythm can be aphoristic or gnomic, then suddenly anecdotal and precise. Burroughs keeps an inventory of the self as if it were a lab bench: substances, symptoms, results. Yet the scientist’s ledger keeps opening to ritual and magic, charms against control, images of portals and entities, amusements with synchronicity. The result is a documentary of consciousness in late style, where compression becomes a kind of mercy.

Memory and reckoning
Old geographies flicker, St. Louis, New York, Mexico City, Tangier, summoned by smells, dreams, and news items. He neither apologizes nor sensationalizes the past, but he does assess it, bluntly. Addiction is treated as ongoing management rather than confession; sexuality, fame, and scandal are acknowledged with a shrug and a joke. The journals are less a settling of accounts than a stripping away: what remains useful? what still stings? where is the joke?

Final notes and legacy
Last Words reads as a field guide to Burroughs’ late-life clarity: a condensed ethos of vigilance, discipline, gallows wit, and an opening to tenderness. Ending almost mid-sentence, it preserves the dailiness of a mind that refused to tidy itself for posterity. The fragment is the point: a final testament that finds, in small entries and spare lines, a surprising gentleness amid the wreckage and a terse affirmation of love at the edge of the void.