Is It Okay to Leave an Ending Open-Ended?

An open-ended ending robs the reader of the emotional reward for completing the book.

As a reader, we deserve to know what happened. We want answers. We want to close the book and feel that the story has reached its destination, that the characters we have invested in are tucked up neatly.

As a writer, I understand that desire, the expectation. And yet, while writing my novel Left Side, I questioned whether giving the reader an answer would actually be the wrong thing to do.

Left Side is set against the backdrop of the 1973 Chilean coup. During and after the coup, thousands of people were detained, disappeared, or taken from their families. Some were swept up simply because of where they were, who they knew, or because they happened to be caught in the machinery of a brutal period in Chilean history. For many families, the uncertainty never ended.

Even today, in 2026, there are families who still don’t know what happened to their loved ones. They don’t know where they were detained. They don’t know where their remains are. They don’t know exactly how their lives ended.The government kept that ending from them.

There is no final chapter for them. There is no tidy resolution. No author to wrap it all up in a neat bow.

That reality became important to me when I was deciding how to end Left Side.

It is the part of the story that weighs on me. I flip back and forth between what the reader may want and what the Chilean people deserve.

An ending like that can feel unsatisfying. As a writer, you can almost hear the reader asking: But what happened to her? Surely I owe them an answer.

Last night, I was talking with a Chilean woman who grew up during the coup. I told her about the ending of Left Side—how I struggle with my obligation to the reader.

Her reaction gave me an answer I knew in my core.

She wept.

She told me how uncles, neighbours, friends parents, were taken in the middle of the night. These people simply disappeared.

My uncertainty of my open-ended ending became resolve. The heaviness of it, the fear, it is what my story needs to be.

It felt like the truth.

Because what does it mean to give a fictional character a definitive ending when the real people who inspired that story were denied one?

For many Chilean families, there was no body to bury. No certainty. No final goodbye. Just an empty chair where a person once sat.

A disappearance doesn’t end when the person disappears.

It continued in the lives of everyone left behind.

The unanswered question became part of the family’s history: Where is she? What happened to him? Did they suffer? Are they somewhere we haven’t looked? Could we ever know?

Perhaps that is why open-ended endings can feel so uncomfortable. We are accustomed to stories giving us something real life often refuses to give us: closure.

But sometimes closure is not the honest ending. Sometimes the most honest ending is an unanswered question.

That doesn’t mean an open ending should be used simply to be clever, mysterious, or provocative. There has to be a reason for leaving the door open. The uncertainty has to belong to the story. For Left Side, I think it does.

My character’s fate is uncertain because the fate of so many real people was uncertain. And perhaps asking the reader to sit with that discomfort is more truthful than inventing an answer for her.

Even writing this now, I still struggle with it. Part of me wants to tell the reader what happened. Part of me wants to give her—and them—some kind of resolution. And I may. I may write a second part, The Right Side, where we find the answers.

But then I think about that conversation last night. I think about the woman who grew up in Chile during the coup, and the pain in her voice when she recognized something of her own experience in the ending of my novel. And I think perhaps an ending doesn’t always have to answer the question. Sometimes it has to make us feel the question. Sometimes the story ends. But for the people who were left behind, it never really does.