Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

Half a Life is a nakedly honest, ultimately hopeful examination of guilt, responsibility, and living with the past.

"Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

So begins Darin Strauss' Half a Life, the true story of how one outing in his father's Oldsmobile resulted in the death of a classmate and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author. We follow Strauss as he explores his startling past-collision life - the funeral, the queasy drama of a high-stakes court case? and what starts as a personal tale of a tragic event opens into the story of how to live with a very hard fact: we can try our human best in the crucial moment, and it might not be good enough. Half a Life is a nakedly honest, ultimately hopeful examination of guilt, responsibility, and living with the past.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Grief, Biography Memoir, Book Club, Death

205 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 2010

About the author

A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a winner of the American Library Association's Alix Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award, the internationally-bestselling writer Darin Strauss is the author of the novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than It Hurts You, and the NBCC-winning memoir Half a Life. These have been New York Times Notable Books, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year, among others. Darin has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries, and he is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU's creative writing program.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

In May, 1988, at age 18, Strauss was driving on a highway with his friends when a sixteen-year-old girl on a bicycle veered from the right shoulder, crossing multiple lanes of traffic. Strauss hit and killed her. Half a Life is his story of how he came to terms with this.

It is reasonable to expect that any young person would be traumatized by such an event. How would one expect that trauma to manifest? In the usual ways, displays of public remorse, acceptance of responsibility, probably deep feelings of guilt, difficulty sleeping. But what if the person is truly blameless? What would be appropriate then?

It is as if one’s interactions with the world are court testimony and one carries around an internal prosecutor or defense attorney coaching us on how we want to come across to the jury. The young Strauss faces not only the issue of coping with what he feels or doesn’t, but what he perceives to be the expectations of others. The fact is that the author did not feel all that much about the accident. The event was not his fault. He was exonerated by all objective measures. Yet he thought that he was expected to feel huge guilt, huge remorse, not just behave in a socially appropriate manner following the accident

Was Strauss wrong in his perception of what the world expected of him after the accident? He is clearly a bright guy, and got it that the world would look askance at him should he follow his auto-trauma with, say, a night of gleeful carousing with his buds, or if he displayed indifference to the death of a young woman. It was appropriate for him to behave in certain ways as a matter of social self-preservation, or what we usually refer to as common decency. There was a role he thought he had to play, and he willingly joined the cast. However, like a method actor, he wanted to have actual, personal feeling to work with, and it was not there.

…sensing the girls were still watching, I dropped to my knees and covered my head with my hands—fingers between the ears and temples, like a man who’s just won the US Open. This “plagiarized” emotional reaction, acted out for girls I’d never see again, is one more stomach-turning fact of that afternoon.

So it sets up a sort of feedback loop. There is no real feeling of guilt, but the author acts to satisfy what he sees as the public expectation. However, since he realizes, intellectually, that his actions do not have a legitimate emotional core, he then experiences actual guilt for not experiencing the guilt he is projecting out into the world.

It is not dishonest to observe social norms. One does not have to experience deep grieving in order to show respect for the victim of an accident. I felt like I wanted to sit this kid down, tell him to stop whining, perform his civic duty, get over it, grow up and move on with his life.

Of course we of the male persuasion have been known, particularly in our youth, to face some challenges without really knowing, let alone articulating what our feelings are. So another interpretation of Strauss’s experience was that he did not really know what he was feeling. Been there, done that, although under much less traumatic circumstances.

I thought this was an honest book, but one that could have been so much more. It might have offered a springboard to a wider look at how people cope in similar situations. Maybe even how society thrusts certain roles on us regardless of how we actually feel, forcing us into a place where what we feel is considered illegitimate. This is a world, of course, governed by externalities. One can hardly count on being rewarded for honesty, for example. Whistle blowers usually wind up fired and harassed. Joe Wilson pops to mind as the poster child for the consequences of honesty in the real world. How many rewards does our society offer for inner beauty? Far fewer than those given for the more observable sort. Evil, is, of course, regularly rewarded. How many Wall-Streeters are in jail?

As long as we do not feel a need for complete emotional transparency in the business of living we can continue on with our lives. You might want to tell your boss what you think of him/her/it, but that is not a formula for success.

Strauss does feint in this direction a time or two, but more in the area of coping with guilt than with managing in the world.

I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from acceptance of our own responsibility to the cool mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody’s pretty unaccountable. (p101) [Are we sure this is not Don Rumsfeld’s book?]

But there has to be a core of actual feeling of responsibility for this notion to apply, and Strauss did not, at core, feel guilty about what happened. So his structure breaks down. It is not about cloaking guilt under a massive defense mechanism. Strauss’ experience is about guilt over the absence of guilt. He really was not responsible for the accident and internalized what he thought was expected.

So is there any larger view to be taken from this? Maybe it is that we can get so caught up in how we appear that we lose sight of who we are, and become a product of our attempt to manage our own image. It has a certain fractal beauty to it. Somewhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual there is probably a diagnosis of facing-mirror-infinitely-reflecting guilt syndrome.

While one may or may not find the person of the author particularly to one's liking, it is easy to admire his writing skill. The book is rich with imagery and smile-inducing turns of phrase.

I’ve come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn’t properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That’s what shock is.

And it is a very fast read. There is a bounty of white space in these pages. While it may list as 191 pages, it is easily only half that. But it is definitely a whole story.


PS - September 18, 2017 - New Yorker Magazine - A fascinating article about people (including the author) coping with having accidentally killed someone - The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer - by Alice Gregory

[Ben Loory · Rating 2 out of 5]

i feel bad for not liking this more than i do; darin strauss seems like a good guy and life definitely dealt him a shitty hand in the accident this memoir is about. but after the first 50 pages or so, it just felt like all the emotion leaked away, and then never really came back. leaving a hundred or so pages of what i would characterize as gentle rumination. which is fine-- it's certainly not a bad book-- but it's not the mind-blowing or heart-wrenching memoir one might expect from such an event. i never even had to go find the kleenex, and i cry at the drop of a hat.

[Peter Derk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't really know how to rate this. Not because it's a bad book. It's a really good book. It feels weird to rate it.

It's kind of like this: My brother taught some English classes at some colleges, and he made a rule that in the beginning classes he didn't want anyone to write essays about two things: Marijuana legalization and personal rape stories. The first because he'd just read too many that covered the same ground. The second sounds a little cold-hearted, but I can get behind his reasoning. He said that it was impossible to grade them. Imagine someone pouring her heart out regarding a terrible personal violation, but looking at it honestly and finding that it was rife with grammatical errors and misspellings. Grading the story of someone's rape just seemed methodical and bizarre, and it made it very difficult for him to ever assign a bad grade, which in some cases may have been an honest grade.

That's kind of how I feel about this book. It's a good book, but it's so deeply personal that it's hard to grade it without feeling like I missed the point entirely.

To do a quick summary, the book starts off with the writer as a young man. He's driving, hits a girl who swerves in front of his car on her bike, and the girl dies. To make matters more complicated, the girl is a student at his high school.

What sets this book apart, to me, is that the author is so honest about everything. He's honest about some of the posturing he did right after the event because he was 17 and didn't really know how one would handle this sort of thing. He's honest about how he sabotaged some of his own relationships in life. He's really very honest about everything, and that's what makes the work book. You can tell he was ready to accept the things he had done and how he had handled it.

Things get a little strange when you start asking yourself why you're reading it. The thing is so personal it feels a little like something that you'd only hear from a close friend, and only after he just couldn't stay quiet about it anymore.

I'd like to think I didn't read it as a gawker, a rubbernecker on the roadside of the guy's life. I honestly don't think of myself as that kind of person.

I'd also like to think that I don't really get any pleasure or relief when reading about the misfortunes of others. It doesn't do a lot for me to watch someone else go through something bad and think, "At least I don't have it that bad."

Honestly, I think that I read it because it's almost like an It's a Wonderful Life kind of thing. We've all been there. Not as far down the road as the author went, but we've been on some kind of precipice. Mostly it comes and goes. You almost hit someone in a crosswalk, or maybe you take a fall and get up shocked that you can still stand under your own power, but we've all been to those places that make you say, "Holy shit. Someone could have died."

It's a good thing to find out what happens, in a way. In a very realistic way. It mostly confirms your worst fears, but like anything that reinforces fear, it's good to know that you're not alone in doing something that you regret or thinking about one life event changing everything afterwards, even if it wasn't your fault or if you don't really want things to be that way. Whether that life event be something this big or something much smaller, it's probably a really good message, especially for young men, to let people know that you might have feelings that you don't understand, don't know how to deal with, and really never go away.

The author himself, in the book, talks about how important the therapeutic act of writing something like this can be. There are proven effects, and a lot of it has to do with subject being able to hold the event in their hands. To have a stack of paper and say, Here it is. Here's that thing that kind of ruined my life. At least you feel some kind of power over it. That you can put it in a container, put some kind of a wall around it at least.

That's why it's so hard to rate this book. It seems like the author was successful on that count. He started the process of containing it, of putting it in a package that might lead to helping him understand everything better.

And it was a good read. He's a talented writer. I just feel strongly that there's no way to read this book without asking yourself why you're reading it and whether you should read it or not.

But how do you rate it? As a book? Or whether it accomplished what I would argue it's main purpose to be, organizing what could be a life-ruining event?

I guess maybe it's like a certain kind of pen. Let's say a Sharpie. I wouldn't want to write with one all the time. And there are a lot of applications where one COULD use it but I wouldn't advise it. However, when you come across a situation where you need a Sharpie, nothing works better.

This book is like that. If you need it, if you're in the right place for the book, it'll be great in it's own very tragic way. If you're not, you'll probably be disappointed and find it to be a completely inappropriate tool.

[Melinda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really didn't like this book. I know, I know. It was supposed to be poignant and emotionally searing and blah blah blah, but the author came across to me as a self indulgent navel gazer. Some of the writing itself was atrocious: "I dropped a clumsy hand to the table and splashed my salad." Had to read that one twice. "My internal climate was a hurricane alley. Emotions blew through, downing power lines, hefting cars onto roofs, destroying the finish. Low trees, dead wood thrown across traffic." Really? Or this: "I was a piece of living trivia. The balloons, that broad squeaking heaven, still floated overhead." What the hell? When the author speaks about his own experiences to others in the book, he uses profound words like "Um," "I don't know," "I guess." Also, I didn't get the way the book was set up, paragraphs at random on pages by themselves for no apparent reason. The author graduated from an MFA program in writing and has evidently written several novels. Maybe this material would have been better in a novel instead of ending up as some kind of therapy the rest of us are induced to buy into because of the disingenuous blurbs on the cover. Drat. I need to go back and change this to a one-star review. It's that awful.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

How can I say it but to say this book was dull? "Remarkable, lyrical and brave," as the blurbs say? "Inspiring and painfully raw?" "Haunting?" Uhhh, nope. Rather like a very tame, too-long therapy session about someone you’re sorry for but can’t get terribly whipped up about. Or even feel all that sorry for, because it's sad and shit luck and all that but where's crazed Dostoevsky when you actually need him? It's great to be introspective if you're, say, Fernando Pessoa.

I didn't like the style.

“My boys are named Beau and Shepherd and their arrival was like two hard kicks to the chest.”
“Sleep was a coating I’d been stripped of, leaving all my wiring exposed.”

I don’t know if it’s trying too hard or not trying hard enough. I don’t want to be ungenerous but the truth is I had to make myself finish. It was a fast read with plenty of one-page blurb chapters, but it lacked blood, tears, real torment and vividness.

“In fiction classes — or in the novelist-as-humble-cobbler image, writing workshops — you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence.”

(A “high rate of occurrence?” For real?)

“But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare: there is no walk, there is no fated grab. You try every fruit, or forget, losing sight of any destination. The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more.”

There. To me it was a bit tedious.

[christa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone with a vivid imagination and a something ton vehicle who has ever cruised alongside a wobbly bicyclist has probably mentally played out this scene: Biker veers left into the path of the car, defies gravity by skirting up the hood, face pressed into the windshield, body tossed like a limp towel to the shoulder of the road, the thump of flesh bags dropped into gravel, the glint of a reflector and the crush of metal.

In the case of Darin Strauss, this is exactly what happened toward the end of his senior year of high school. His Oldsmobile load of friends en route to a mini golf course; the victim was the athletic younger school mate Celine Zilke.

“Half a life ago, I killed a girl,” Strauss writes in his memoir “Half a Life,” the story of 18 years of living with the proverbial blood on his fender, an accident that was ruled an accident by witnesses and authorities. Still, it happened during those years when a teenager already feels the harsh and judge-y gaze of peers -- all the more penetrating because it involves a dead girl.

“How do I keep the accident from being the main thing about me forever,” he wonders.

After graduation, Strauss tries to shed this distinction. He goes away to college and holds the story captive in his own head. He replays Zilke’s mother’s funeral-side curse to live for two as he works his way into adulthood. He thinks of the girl when he reaches for a can of soda and realizes she will never get to reach for another soda. Occasionally he gets to the point in relationships where he feels that he has to tell a girlfriend -- and these moments are met with mixed responses: awkward comforting gazes, phone calls that aren’t returned, a sharing of a personal tragic experience, anger. Finally, 18 years after it happened, married with two children, the writer who is known as a novelist shares his most-consuming story.

It’s honest in a way that had to be hard to write: A moment at the scene of the accident when some pretty girls wander over and ask what happens and he purposefully and self-consciously morphs himself into the portrait of a grieving man. The assertion that maybe young Celine was suicidal, holding fast to a journal entry she had penned the day of her death in which she reveals that she has finally realized that she is going to die. (Someday? Or within a few hours? Hard to decipher the emo intents of a high school girl with a journal). Sometimes he feels Celine with him; Sometimes he feels like he should feel Celine with him. And the numbness.

This story is, obviously, gripping. But Strauss doesn’t let that keep him from applying word-magic in the way he tells it.

“I’ve come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn’t properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That’s what shock is.”

[esmepie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've been waiting for this for months from the library. Based on the reviews, I expected to be blown away, but I wasn't even mildly impressed, much less very interested.

Quickly summarized, this is a memoir written by a now-adult author who accidentally hit a classmate with his car when he was a senior in high school, and this accident resulted in her death. In the end notes the author states he originally thought this would be told in a longer essay--perhaps 40 to 50 pages--but his editors (Dave Eggers! Ira Glass!) helped him turn it into a longer book (just over 200 pages). First, the author should have trusted his instincts--there isn't enough here for a longer book, at least not the way he tells the story. One of my pet peeves is a magazine article masquerading as a full-length book. The other stumbling block for me is that there are so many avenues the author could have explored and which would have been interesting to the reader--more about the girl who died, more about his family (the reader learns virtually nothing except his family was wonderful, always), more about his own health problems and how he thinks they might have connected to the accident. In short, the author could/should have interviewed others about the same event for a more textured understanding, but I think because he still has (and reasonably so) much guilt and shame about the event, these are places he didn't want to go. Thus the book is too slim and too surfacy--there's not enough to hang an entire book on. Nor are there enough specific scenes to adequately express all the author goes through--the entire book seems to be taken up with describing how he feels throughout without using events and incidents to show the same thing. Overall, the author seems very concerned that his readers know he is a good person, but he could have trusted us more--it's very clear that he is a good person.

Lastly, and these are my pet peeves and not enough to take away stars, but overall, the book needed a better editor--there were several typos (wrong words chosen when it was obvious what the intended word was) and several inapropriate verb choices--for instance, a beer can "slobbered" all over someone's hand. Minor point, and yet extremely irritating to this reader.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book in one sitting, staying up much later than I probably should have, because really, how can you not? I had a lot of love for Strauss as a writer before reading this, based solely on his fiction, and now I have about ten million times as much.

Memoirs can be such a dicey thing: it’s so easy to hit a wrong note, or a right note unearned. But Strauss nails it. He gets at “complicated grief” in a really important way, looks inward and outward at the mess it can make, the shadow it can cast, the self it can form around it. He also shows how one moves on and lives life - because that’s what life requires, ultimately, of all of us - but how a ghost (and a guilt) followed him nearly every step of the way. The way to move past it, of course, is to move through it, and he eventually does, but not in some trite or revelatory, writerly way. Instead, he beats up on himself endlessly - beats up on all aspects of his reaction to the no-fault death he “caused”, even the social part of him that pretends grief at times for love, when what he really feels is closer to confusion - and then learns to forgive himself for being human, for being not perfect, and learns to accept love where it’s offered to him.

It’s quite an amazing, you-need-to-read-this book.

[Richard Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve just read Half a Life, Darin Strauss’ book about an event in his life when he was still a boy, but driving, that would shape forever the man he would and could become. He begins like this. “Half my life ago,” he writes, “I killed a girl.” I don’t want to say more about the ostensible subject of the book, because you should discover for yourself how Mr Strauss has taken that cold fact and crafted from it both a work of art and a humble, useful object. And also, because for me, the book’s true subject is the tension between blamelessness and responsibility, and how, in the lifelong negotiation of that, one finds the detects the smoke signals that remind us of our own humanness. The book moved me to tears, not in its “sad” depiction of the accident and its aftermath, but in the author’s account of his attempts to make sense of it and of himself, and how, after failing, as anyone would, he emerged from it a man worthy and capable of love. If you want a book about Closure, or Forgiveness, or Healing, try another part of the bookstore; Half a Life is about being unforgivable and unforgiven. It is what happens when an author of Strauss’s gifts sits down at his screen and uses it, Clockwork Orange-style, as a mirror from which he can’t look away. The sight of yourself always, always at your worst, the knowledge that the longer you look the uglier you’ll get, and you have to find the words that will tell it all, that you can’t do anything ever but be your own bleak jury … knowing you’ll never be able to tell it all, the story of your own face, and life, and the thousand terrible things you’ve done. It’s unbearable, sometimes because, I think, for the book’s brief ride, he offers you the chance to be him. Who would want to? he seems to ask. But a book like this is the answer to that. This reader would. I would. There aren’t enough books like this. So I would.
HALF A LIFE is a thriller, too. What will happen to Darin when the dead girl’s parents, who have told him the words he thinks he most needs to hear — It wasn’t your fault — turn around and sue him for millions before his life has even begun? And it’s a love story, as well, of meeting the woman he’d marry, who’d make him see that this story, and what it had done to him, was no longer only his, that there was now someone else in it with him, and with that came a new level of responsibility. To make something of it. Which he did. Which he’s done. It’s a fine book.

[K.J. Dell'Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give this six stars if I could. It's a literary memoir and yet it's so much more and less than a memoir. It's perhaps the tightest, sparsest book I've ever read, reminding me of an artist Margery Allingham once invented who painted magnificent pictures and then took away just a little here, and covered in white just a little there, until there was just a perfect echo of a picture left. That's what Strauss has done; he's given us just enough of his life and himself to release the part of him altered beyond recognition by an accident "half a life" ago, in which he killed a girl from his high school.

I love it, I love how he gives us all the layers of his thoughts, from the thoughts he wanted others to think he was thinking to the thoughts he thought he should be thinking right down to the ugly thoughts beneath those, and then, sometimes, even down to the scrapings on real emotion that are left at the bottom. He's one of the writers I want to be when I grow up.

[joey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stubbornly honest and disarmingly vulnerable, Darin Strauss's concise memoir tells of two lives tragically united by accident, one life that ended and another that continued, transformed. I felt overwhelmed--alternately weighed down and buoyed--by Strauss’s cathartic recounting of an automobile accident, not his fault, decades ago, and the sadness, pain, survivor's guilt, litigation, confusion, learning, growth, and gratitude that followed.

Strauss refuses to offer pithy answers, easy self-help quick-fix solutions to grief, to loss, to the messy, lonely, terrible uncertainty of suffering. Instead, he (humbly, tentatively) concludes that time and continued striving are the makeshift, stopgap, good-enough treatment for grief.

Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end ... but addition .... We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity.

Strauss has crafted an ode to ambivalence and solipsism--in a positive, insightful way--even as he recognizes, and struggles to free himself from, his own ambivalence and solipsism. He is ambivalent about his lack of objective guilt, his feelings of subjective guilt, and his desire for forgiveness, about the bleeding-together of capricious accident and apparent fate. He is solipsistic about grief, his own self-absorption, and his flailing attempts at therapy, healing, and love. His noblest moments are tainted by acknowledged (but perhaps inevitable) self-centeredness, but by the same token his most desperate confessions are ennobled by his aspiration toward understanding, toward growth.

Strauss’s memoir is quiet, tender, melancholy, hopeful.

(Goodreads and the Federal Trade Commission want me to note that I received a complimentary advance reader’s edition of this book.)

[Dylan Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread: August 2019
It didn't have the emotional impact of the first reading, however my thoughts and feelings remain mostly unchanged. I honestly wish I had more to say but the review below covers it pretty well. (Go Past Me.) 4/5

Original Review: December 2016
4/5

I love the feeling when books come out of nowhere and surprise you, nestling into your brain like an old friend you never suspected you were missing.

This was a random pick from the Dollar Tree. I didn't mean to buy anything, I just needed to use the restroom, but on my way out I saw this and started leafing through the pages and soon I was through the first few chapters and I knew what would be taking over my free time over the next few days.

Half a Life is Darin Strauss' heart-wrenching tale of hitting a girl with his car when he was a teenager, and what happens after she dies. I won't say much more because I believe this is best to go into blind. But I will say Strauss captures and portrays the feeling of survivor's guilt vividly, and the dry, almost stilted writing style in this helped set the mood well.

My only complaint--and what docks a star--is that the book lost steam for me in the second half. After a certain point I felt he didn't go deep enough into his life. In one of the last chapters he mentions how he edited out stories to help keep the emotional heart of the piece intact, and while I appreciate that, it made the second half feel less substantial than the first. Maybe that's wrong to expect of a memoir, but it was my reaction as a reader.

Still, this book has stayed with me, and will make it on my Best of 2016.

[Riley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first section (about the accident) is choppy, complex, and full of future-self-looking-back insights that make it hard to connect with what's happening in the story. I wish Strauss had been able to commit to the past, had allowed himself to show us what that time was like WITHOUT all the disclaimers and "please don't think badly of me" remarks. He wrote "My fear now is that all of this sounds over-aestheticized, and vague." Unfortunately that's exactly what happened.

HOWEVER. The following sections (about the trial, about his slow acceptance, about his "conclusions") were well-written and much easier to get into. It's a short memoir on a topic that has always interested me (what happens to someone after they have taken a life? whether accidentally or on purpose) and I enjoyed his reflections. I also found myself identifying with some of them, due to a very different kind of incident in my own past, which also took place during my senior year of high school.

So it was a bit of a mixed bag for me. But not a bad one.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

By his own admission, Darin Strauss wrote this book as part of his healing process more than two decades after causing the death of one of his high school classmates in a car vs bicycle accident. Although Darin was cleared of any wrongdoing, it still became the defining moment in his life. Writing it all down for the world to read was his way of exorcizing the tremendous guilt and grief he had been holding inside for so long. His introspection and self-awareness were interesting, and I found myself pausing several times to consider whether I would have reacted in a similar fashion had it happened to me. This was one of my book club's selections, and it will undoubtedly give the group lots to discuss.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

When he was 18 years old and a few weeks away from his high school graduation, Darin Strauss hit a girl with his car who was riding a bicycle and then suddenly swerved into the road. Although five eyewitnesses and the police who investigated the accident said there was nothing he could have done to avoid the collision, Darin is understandably filled with guilt and grief. This memoir is about how this accident has affected Darin's life. As he progresses through life, he feels the ghost of Celine with him as he realizes milestones that she will never live through. A very well written book. I would like to read Strauss's fiction.

[Eliza Pillsbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

starting to read up on my future professors!

[Eric Sasson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful stuff. Strauss is unflinching in his ability to examine himself clearly and see how he (and by extension all of us) construct a life around certain pivotal moments that happen to us, and how he had to learn to accept that certain questions will never be answered, and even when they are, the answers may not be satisfying. Most interestingly for me is how he makes the connection between the accident and his becoming a writer: by filling him with self- doubt, and forcing him to attain different kinds of empathy, the accident effectively opened up the path for him to express himself through his writing. He also masterfully demonstrates just how much his emotions surrounding the accident were about how he was perceived and how performative his persona had to become to meet what he imagined were others expectations. This resonated with me a great deal, as did so many of his other observations. Highly recommended.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had this memoir on my to-read shelf for far too long; I think someone gave it to me or I picked it up at a book sale. Still, I remember Darin Strauss telling a version of this story on This American Life a while ago—how one day near the end of his senior year of high school, he was driving some of his friends to play mini-golf and he struck and killed a girl on a bicycle. Darin knew this girl, Celine Zilke, because she was a year behind him in high school, but yet he didn’t really know her. A brief moment, 10 seconds or so, as Celine’s bicycle careened across two lanes of traffic and into the path of Darin’s car, changed everything for both Celine and Darin. For Celine, it’s obvious. She died. For Darin, it was (or rather has been) far more murky and complex.

In this memoir, Strauss attempts to look back at this moment in 1988 and explore how it shaped his life but how he does it is extremely compelling—in fits and starts, at once both brutally honest and self-conscious. He nails the weirdness and fictionality of grief and trauma in a way that both is very individual to his situation but also extremely relatable to anybody going through loss, particularly sudden and random loss (or at least it seemed so for me).

By the time he attempted to tackle this subject as a writer, Strauss had already published three novels—all of which has traces of his tragedy “salted” in them but none which tackled it head on. Strauss discusses how if he had written his story as fiction, there would be moments that needed to be pumped up for drama and there would probably be a moment of “epiphany,” as there often are in novels and short stories. The protagonist picks up a leaf from the ground and ponders the inevitability of death, for example. However, in real life, Strauss argues, there is no ONE moment of epiphany:

Things don’t go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Elliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freed from the past, or from the future.

But we keep making our ways, as we have to. We’re all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that’s the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we’re riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.

So it’s an epiphany after all. You have it in your hands the whole time (186).

As I read this book, I kept thinking about how Ethan Couch, the “affluenza teen,” seems untouched by guilt or remorse even after drunkenly mowing down four people while Strauss’s life is profoundly shaped by a moment, that really was simply an accident. Yet, Strauss argues that there were “stories” he needed to tell himself about the accident for many years in order to survive so maybe Couch’s obliviousness/callousness is pure survival instinct. He has to tell himself a story where he is not to blame because to live with a full knowledge of what he did may be impossible. [That is not to say that he isn’t a totally horrible douche bag but still even a**holes have inner lives.]

But I digress. One of the many things I loved about this memoir (which I devoured) is that it not only made me think about Darin Strauss and Celine Zilke but about so many other things: survival guilt, affluenza teens, grief, and the power of reflection and narrative. I remember being very affected by the This American Life piece I heard a number of years ago, but this offspring of that piece affected me even more.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very interesting account of one of those events of which you think: "What would it be like if this ever happened to me?" At the age of 18 (he's now 40), while driving to the beach, Darin Straus hit and killed a girl riding on a bicycle; she'd inexplicably turned into his lane. Although he was absolved of any blame, the accident has shadowed his life since (aided by a cruel million-dollar lawsuit brought by the girl's parents). I have never read an account like the one of Straus returning to school after the accident, having suddenly become The Boy Who Drove the Car. For me the most fascinating and moving parts were those in which Straus is able to convey how muddy and tamped-down feelings over a tragedy can be--how persistently he simply hasn't known what he feels about the girl's death. This touches on a truth rarely told: that our feelings about extreme events are almost never easily accessed or presented. At times the prose gets a little murky (perhaps mirroring Straus's ongoing uncertainties), but kudos to the author for attempting this story.

September 2012 update: Something drove me to read this book again this past weekend (it is quite short), and I was even more impressed this time around. This may be because I was no longer distracted by the what-happened, which I already knew, and could more fully absorb the challenge Strauss surmounted. How does one write the story of something that happened in an instant, in one's youth, and many years ago, yet which has bled its way into everything since? How does one access and then translate horribly mixed and uncertain emotions? The honesty and the sense of struggle here are really quite awe-inspiring.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Darrin Strauss's novels, and I think he's a top notch writer. This memoir was solid, but left me feeling a little underwhelmed. It's the story of the car wreck that killed a girl in his high school; Strauss drove the car that hit her, and although it was an accident pure and simple, of course he has spent the next 20 years grappling with his guilt.

Technically-speaking, the writing is good, and the unfolding of the main story is well-paced. I also understand why he wanted to write the book -- the events are deeply-felt, and the aftereffects are far-reaching. And suddenly I'm using an nutty amount of hyphenated words... Anyway, I felt his grief, his guilt, his utter ignorance about how to proceed with his life. But for some reason, the book didn't connect with me on an emotional level, perhaps because Strauss spends so many years not knowing what to feel, and thus feels nothing.

The most moving part of the book was his lengthy quotation from Amy Hempel's short story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." THAT story packs more of a punch than this whole memoir. Strauss is so loathe to have anyone feel sympathy for him (survivor's guilt) that he manages to keep the reader at arm's length. A gut-wrench might not have been the point.

But this doesn't feel like the sort of book to be dissected. It's a sad story, well-told, and it seems like it was cathartic for the writer.

[Lily Snape · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely despised it. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm not as intelligently enriched as the rest of the people that loved it. Perhaps I didn't fully grasp it. But I know what the book was meant to be. Touching, gripping, life-changing, and full of emotion. Perhaps it was such, but there are aspects of it that overshadowed these things for me. For instance, it was forcefully described. I reminded me a bit of SMeyers description. (But of course not as bad. Smeyers is the worst you'll find.) The type a five year old would do: the sky was as blue as the ocean. Descriptions are supposed to paint a picture in your head, while being unnoticeable. Mr.Strauss doesn't have that type of description. His are bumpy, noticeable, and overwhelming. I also had a problem with the fact that every other paragraph had an attempted philosophical addition. Again, these are supposed to be unnoticeable inserts that the reader discovers only after the ending of the book, when they are sitting in their kitchen with a cup of tea, unable to take their mind off the recently finished book. It wasn't like that. Quite the opposite. I stopped paying attention to these paragraphs. They were too frequent, too awkward, and again, too overwhelming. That's only the tip of the iceberg. I really wasn't thrilled with this read.

[Dierdra McGill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book I have read by this author and this is the first non fiction book he wrote. The book is about what happened to his life after at age 18 he hit and killed a girl with his car. She crossed two lanes of traffic on her bike and he hit her.
The book seemed like an interesting topic and I enjoy reading memories but this book was just not all that interesting for me. I can't even start to imagine how hard it had to have been for the author to write this book tho because it is very personal but I just could not feel the emotions he felt if that makes any sense. I wanted to feel emotion when reading a book like this but I just did not.
The book is not a bad book tho and it is worth your time as it is not long and does addresses an interesting point, I have no idea how I would deal with it if the girl was my child or if I had been in his situation either, yes it was an accident but that does not mean it does not change your life.

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this memoir about a life changing accident the author had just before high school graduation but it proved to be hugely disappointing. The best part of the book, was the cover: one half of a paper cover to go along with the theme of "half" a life. The author was not only self absorbed, pretty much a necessity for a memoir writer, he had no personal growth or worthwhile observations to make. It probably deserves one half of a star!

[Doneen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was deeply depressing, not unusual for such a tragic experience (that's not why I didn't like it very much). I hope it helped the author come to terms with the tragedy that occurred, but it's very difficult (at least it was for me) to understand what he's getting at in his writing about the event. He seems to write around what he wants to say instead of just saying it. And for me that took away from getting his point(s).

[Garwen Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir by the author, who had lived most of his life every waking day to recall the day he had hit a young bicyclist with his car and killed her. Absolved of responsibility by the police, he personally was unable to shake the guilt, and it isn't until his late 30's that he begins the memoir and his ability to live with the events in his past.

[Oriana]

So cool, I won another giveaway! I copyedited a section of this, or a prototype of this, or anyway some smaller thing with the same title on the same subject by the same dude, for McSweeney's a little while ago, and it was harrowing and lush. Very excited to read the rest!

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't believe the amount of good reviews this book has received. I found the author's self-absorbtion really off-putting and halfway, couldn't manage to see it through.

[Nancy Woodruff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little disappointed in this one, I'm sorry to say. I was riveted by the subject matter but it all felt a little sour, rather than profound and heartfelt, by the end.

[Phoebe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author seems like an incredibly decent person. But this book read like something he should have written for himself rather than for publication.

[Alli · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a wonderful memoir, but I might have liked it a little more if I did not have to write a full essay on it."