Things That Crash, Things That Fly

by Scott Gould

Things That Crash, Things That Fly is about many lost love, daughters and fathers, evaporating marriage, Italian sandals, friendship, bad knees, acrobatic birds, secrecy, oddly placed piercings…but most of all, Gould’s inventive memoir is about how it’s truly possible to rise and soar, even after you’ve struck the ground. As a husband and wife make plans for an Italian vacation with friends—to visit her family’s Tuscan village—she makes an unexpected, last-minute addition to the she plans to leave him upon their return to the States. And her bombshell includes a strange caveat. He isn’t allowed to breathe a word of it to their traveling companions. So begins Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the groundbreaking new memoir from award-winning writer Scott Gould. Gould navigates that awkward vacation with his soon-to-be estranged wife in Serra, Italy, then sets out on another, longer journey—a winding route through heartbreak and anger, confusion and futility, despair and discovery. When Gould wangles (under dubious circumstances) a fellowship to research the death of William Guilfoil, a young WWII fighter pilot who crashed and died in the hills near Serra, he instead sets his sights on clarity and closure in his ex-wife’s ancestral home. As he grinds through an uncharted future, his story and Guilfoil’s become intertwined, and Gould gathers the fragments of a fractured heart. With a brutal honesty tempered with surprising humor, he tells us how he begins to stitch them back together.

Genres: Nonfiction

278 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 9, 2021

About the author

Scott Gould is the author of six books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Pangyrus, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, and New Stories from the South, among others. His new novel, Peace Like a River, is forthcoming in August 2025 from Regal House Publishing. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina.

Reviews

[Roz Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written, agonisingly honest memoir about the sudden and shocking disintegration of the author's marriage. Every line is rich with meaningful detail, yet expertly economical. Scott Gould draws us into his warm, nurturing family with an account of his elder daughter's orthopaedic surgeries, and we feel his disbelief that this home will soon be split. He and his wife become strangers, a process narrated in spare and striking details. 'These days she does not say if she is going for a run or to the store, she just leaves as if ths is rehearsing for the final exit'. As he struggles to move on, he returns to his wife's home town in Italy to write about an American fighter pilot, though he also has less noble intentions. He tries to integrate with her people with limited success (and enjoyable self-deprecating humour) and underneath is the unfathomable pain he is still reckoning with. He writes of the pilot: 'What does a man think as he glides to the end?' - his own predicament too. Highly satisfying.

[Cinthia Ritchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what an unexpected and welcomed find. I discovered Gould after coming across one of his pieces in a 50-word story lit mag, and immediately snatched up his memoir. And I wasn't disappointed, for this well-crafted read is so rich, so fat in allegory and humor, sincerity and the lies we tell both ourselves and others, that I never wanted to reach the end.
Here's a lowdown of the plot (which is written in short and quick chapters, with titles alternating between English and Italian). After unexpectedly learning that his wife is leaving him after a planned vacation to Italy, Gould desperately tries to win her back. This doesn’t work, of course, and the writing in this beginning section so slyly veers between bittersweet and self-deprecating humor that it's impossible to not both sympathize and root for Gould (for haven't we all done this, tried to win back the love of someone who has already emotionally left us?).
Gould then introduces us to his daughters (and oh, how lovingly and beautifully he describes his daughters!) and his home life, his bum knee (from too many years of playing ball) and his life post-divorce, all of which leads him back to the same small Italian village (where his wife's relatives still live, and so he is doomed to see her face in everyone), and where he researches an oddly fascinating account of Guilfoil, an American airman shot down during WWII and buried in the village's cemetery.
While Guilfoil's story doesn't parallel Gould's, it does act as the necessary catalyst pivoting Gould to, if not exactly a resolution, a type of peace and acceptance of his life, his shambled marriage, and his past.
I cried at the end, when Gould gifts his daughter’s with pieces of his own story, a concept so simple and yet so intricately beautiful that it perfectly sums up this odd, story-within-a-story-within-a-story.
I highly, highly recommend this very warm, and very wry, read.

[Anne Shealy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've still not quite figured out how Scott Gould can write a memoir about his divorce and not cause the reader to hate the soon-to-be ex-wife. Yeah, I was mad at her the moment she told him she was leaving him because we are supposed to be on his side, right? I was so caught up in the excitement of the trip to Italy and the characters along the way that I forgot that she was the bad guy in the story. Scott Gould has written a beautiful memoir that makes you want to travel abroad and meet people along the way. He makes you want to write sentences that stay with your reader for life. He makes you want to watch for ill-fitting dentures and folks with missing fingers. He makes you wanna read the rest of his books.

[Steve Zettler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly engrossing memoir from first page to last, and a wonderful journey - despite the bumps in the road. Laced with perfect helpings of humor, kindness and love, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read.

[Melanie Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott Gould's memoir hits the sweet spot between candor about the painful experiences in life and hilarious levity about these same moments. I laughed and I cried, and I laughed again.

Readers who enjoy memoir about Italy, Italian history, divorce nonfiction, family nonfiction, and humor will greatly appreciate this narrative of a husband's emotional (and later in the book, physical) pain while on the road visiting his soon-to-be-ex-wife's Italian family and in the subsequent months post-divorce when he returns to Italy.

Combining Italian history and personal experiences in modern American life as one is divorcing and rebuilding a life, this book has lyric prose that keeps the pages turning and the journey a most enjoyable one.

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I award Scott Gould the highest compliment a female reader can give a male author of a divorce memoir, that of making me laugh big and often!

The achievement gains even more prestige when you consider how tempting it must be for a spurned author to simply whine about his soon-to-be ex-wife. Yet Gould wildly succeeds at making his journey through divorce hell a hilarious romp, primarily by employing brutal honesty when describing his cringy self-awakening, in which the many once-buried flaws that led to this juncture are shot into the sky like so many fireworks for all to see.

Better still, the memoir reads like a novel that begins with the juicy moment his wife informs him she’s leaving him. Worse, she’s not leaving him now, but rather in five weeks, after they return from their long-planned trip to her small hometown in Italy. Even more shocking, she wants him to keep the news a secret from everyone: their three daughters, their friends and her relatives.

Who does that, give such heartbreaking news so far in advance? And what spouse would actually agree to go through with both the vacation and secrecy?

Gould’s details about people; his self-deprecating epiphanies; the beautifully-drawn scenes of the small Italian town and its story of another man who literally crashed and burned: all took me to where I’ve never been before, inside the mind and heart of a man who must endure the bombing of his married life in which the possibility of survival, let alone solo flight, are very much at risk.

Bravissimo!

[Ann Epstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Good Storyteller with a Good Story to Tell – Scott Gould’s memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly, speaks to everyone recovering from an experience — in his case a divorce — that has left them blind-sided and angry, in search of explanations and revenge. On the eve of a trip to Italy, including the small village where his wife’s family is from, she announces that she will leave him when they return. Readers recognize her sadism, but in his desperation to remain married, Gould is in denial until a “piercing” revelation (I won’t spoil it by revealing more) releases his rage. Wallowing in post-divorce misery, Gould returns to Italy to investigate the death of a young American World War Two bomber and tarnish his ex’s reputation. A good storyteller, with a good story to tell, Gould has an outward-looking eye for detail and an inward-looking eye for reflection. As an author myself (see my Goodreads author page https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...), I appreciate the dexterity with which Gould interweaves these two perspectives. In search of revenge, he experiences gratitude. In search of closure, he instead opens himself to new people and possibilities. Gould discovers that the dead soldier is kept alive by the stories of the villagers. Likewise, this return journey is a resurrection for the author. He tells his own tale and in the end, the book and its author soar.

[Paula Belnap · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read three of Scott Gould’s books, Strangers to Temptation, Whereabouts and now his memoir, and always enjoy Gould’s storytelling, his lyric descriptions, self deprecating sense of humor, spirit for adventure and the spark of life he gives to every character. Gould’s forced silence at the beginning of the book, when he first learns his wife will leave him and is told he can’t tell anyone, pays forward with the surge of energy that propels his narrative, Gould wasting no time giving his ex-wife a chance to explain her side of their marriage’s dissolution. This journey of this book is not to understand why a marriage failed but how a man survived it. Along the way, readers visit Italy twice, and meet the villagers in the town of Serra Pistoiese, who have acted as caretakers for pieces of another story for more than a generation, the story of a WWII plane crash, which they gift to the narrator along with their own stories. Gould takes these many story shards, along with the plane’s fuselage and broken body parts and creates a book that wins the unspoken argument of the book, who gets to tell a story and when: the best story teller, whenever he likes.

[Joanne Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott Gould is a born storyteller. He likes to observe, to listen. But one day, seventeen years into his marriage, his wife changes the narrative he thought he was living. She is going to leave him in a few weeks—right after a family vacation to Italy. In his wonderfully named memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly, Gould deconstructs the fictions of his life in hopes of creating a new story. As many of us must when hurting, he embarks on a painful quest he hopes will lead to closure. In prose that is by turns humorous and heartbreaking Gould immerses the reader in his journey of healing. Along the way he’ll discover just how similar crashes and flights can be.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I needed to read an "Indie" book and chose this one. I admit I wanted to like it after I discovered it was a memoir. But I kept wishing the narrator would move on and get a grip... Now that I realize it was a memoir, I can be a little less impatient since this was an authentic reaction to the dismantling of a marriage and family. His description of Serra and all things Italian did make me wish I could go myself. I was relieved to read in the end that he had his knee replaced. This is a raw look at how devastating divorce can be. I admit by the end of the book I could only hope his ex-wife is miserable.

[Alexi Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"My wife was happy half the time and spent the other half worrying about why she wasn't happy all the time"

This book was a knockout for the first half. Full of insightful, heartbreaking, and funny lines. Then meandered during the second half, though I suppose that was fitting as that was the journey the author was going on too. The story of what happens during the dissolution of a marriage (from the husband's perspective).

[Marjorie Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this memoir! A wife's betrayal, a ww II flyer's crash to earth - this American writer returns to the tiny Italian village where his happiest family moments are remembered. In heartbreaking, funny, and moving prose, two broken men find a way to live again.

[RYCJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic writing. Smooth... relaxing... easy-going flow, often humorous and draws on the emotions; kind of reminiscent of 'The Alchemist' (writing-wise, not story). Overall very good...and interesting, even if somewhat repetitive. Read paperback, 2021 copyright 2021 edition.

[Brian Livingston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal, humorous memoir about the agony of divorce (and knee pain)

[Gary Apple · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed this book. Easy read.

[Brad Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was all right, but I feel like Gould was trying to make a book-length work out of little substance.