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Ever After: A Father's True Story
In August of 1988, heavy black smoke engulfed an Oregon highway, causing a massive 23-car pileup that claimed the lives of novelist William Wharton's 36-year-old daughter, her husband, and their two infant daughters. They'd been victims of field burning, a routine agricultural practice, and were burned alive in their van. How could such a thing happen? And how could a father come to terms with such a loss? Ever After , Wharton's first memoir, is his search for answers to these questions, written with the inspired simplicity that won him great acclaim for his novels.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
1 person is currently reading
75 people want to read
About the author
William Wharton
39 books262 followersWilliam Wharton (7 November 1925 - 29 October 2008), the pen name of the author Albert William Du Aime (pronounced as doo-EM), was an American-born author best known for his first novel Birdy, which was also successful as a film.
Wharton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1943, and was inducted into the school's Wall of Fame in 1997. He volunteered to serve in the United States Army during World War II, and was assigned to serve in a unit to be trained as engineers. He ended up being assigned to serve in the infantry and was severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. After his discharge, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles and received a undergraduate degree in art and a doctorate in psychology, later teaching art in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
His first novel Birdy was published in 1978 when he was more than 50 years old. Birdy was a critical and popular success, and Alan Parker directed a film version starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine. After the publication of Birdy and through the early 1990s, Du Aime published eight novels, including Dad and A Midnight Clear, both of which were also filmed, the former starring Jack Lemmon.
Many of the protagonists of Wharton's novels, despite having different names and backgrounds, have similar experiences, attitudes, and traits that lead one to presume that they are partly autobiographical[citation needed]. There is precious little certifiable biography available about Wharton / Du Aime. He served in France and Germany in World War II in the 87th Infantry Division, was a painter, spent part of his adult life living on a houseboat as an artist in France, raised several children (not all of whom appreciated his philosophy of child-rearing), is a reasonably skilled carpenter and handyman, and has suffered from profound gastrointestinal problems.
In 1988, Wharton's daughter, Kate; his son-in-law, Bert; and their two children, two-year-old Dayiel and eight-month-old Mia, were killed in a horrific 23-car motor vehicle accident near Albany, Oregon, that was caused by the smoke generated by grass-burning on nearby farmland. In 1995, Wharton wrote a (mostly) non-fiction book, Ever After: A Father's True Story, in which he recounts the incidents leading up to the accident, his family's subsequent grief, and the three years he devoted to pursuing redress in the Oregon court system for the field-burning that caused the accident. Houseboat on Seine, a memoir, was published in 1996, about Wharton's purchase and renovation of a houseboat.
It is worth to be noted that he gained an enormous and very hard to be explained popularity in Poland, which was followed by many editions as well as meetings and, eventually, some works prepared and edited only in Polish.
Wharton died on October 29, 2008 of an infection he contracted while being hospitalized for blood-pressure problems.
Wharton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1943, and was inducted into the school's Wall of Fame in 1997. He volunteered to serve in the United States Army during World War II, and was assigned to serve in a unit to be trained as engineers. He ended up being assigned to serve in the infantry and was severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. After his discharge, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles and received a undergraduate degree in art and a doctorate in psychology, later teaching art in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
His first novel Birdy was published in 1978 when he was more than 50 years old. Birdy was a critical and popular success, and Alan Parker directed a film version starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine. After the publication of Birdy and through the early 1990s, Du Aime published eight novels, including Dad and A Midnight Clear, both of which were also filmed, the former starring Jack Lemmon.
Many of the protagonists of Wharton's novels, despite having different names and backgrounds, have similar experiences, attitudes, and traits that lead one to presume that they are partly autobiographical[citation needed]. There is precious little certifiable biography available about Wharton / Du Aime. He served in France and Germany in World War II in the 87th Infantry Division, was a painter, spent part of his adult life living on a houseboat as an artist in France, raised several children (not all of whom appreciated his philosophy of child-rearing), is a reasonably skilled carpenter and handyman, and has suffered from profound gastrointestinal problems.
In 1988, Wharton's daughter, Kate; his son-in-law, Bert; and their two children, two-year-old Dayiel and eight-month-old Mia, were killed in a horrific 23-car motor vehicle accident near Albany, Oregon, that was caused by the smoke generated by grass-burning on nearby farmland. In 1995, Wharton wrote a (mostly) non-fiction book, Ever After: A Father's True Story, in which he recounts the incidents leading up to the accident, his family's subsequent grief, and the three years he devoted to pursuing redress in the Oregon court system for the field-burning that caused the accident. Houseboat on Seine, a memoir, was published in 1996, about Wharton's purchase and renovation of a houseboat.
It is worth to be noted that he gained an enormous and very hard to be explained popularity in Poland, which was followed by many editions as well as meetings and, eventually, some works prepared and edited only in Polish.
Wharton died on October 29, 2008 of an infection he contracted while being hospitalized for blood-pressure problems.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 15, 2014
I don't know William Wharton but after reading many of his books, and rereading Tidings regularly at Christmas time, I feel as if I do. Tidings is especially autobiographical (and Ever After makes that very clear). Something about Will's voice is the voice of an old friend. So to discover this book was to go through a very emotional trauma with someone I care about very much.
Wharton's daughter, son-in-law and two babies were killed in a horrible pile up on an Oregon highway. It was an accident that could have been avoided if the state had banned the practice of field burning. I don't see my edition on goodreads but it does not have the tag line "A Father's True Story." Instead is is a newer edition and opens by saying it is fiction but told as truly as he can. The first part of the book is his daughter's life leading up to the accident and, of course, he can't know the conversations and the thoughts that he writes here to give us an understanding of who his daughter was. The second part of the book is from his own point of view from the moment he heard the news through the trial. Will is sympathetic, thoughtful, crazy at times and drives his lawyers nuts. I won't "spoil" the outcome of the trial but the process was infuriating. This book full of love and full of sorrow. A beautiful tribute to his daughter but also a shameful example of how our legal system seems twisted out of shape.
Wharton's daughter, son-in-law and two babies were killed in a horrible pile up on an Oregon highway. It was an accident that could have been avoided if the state had banned the practice of field burning. I don't see my edition on goodreads but it does not have the tag line "A Father's True Story." Instead is is a newer edition and opens by saying it is fiction but told as truly as he can. The first part of the book is his daughter's life leading up to the accident and, of course, he can't know the conversations and the thoughts that he writes here to give us an understanding of who his daughter was. The second part of the book is from his own point of view from the moment he heard the news through the trial. Will is sympathetic, thoughtful, crazy at times and drives his lawyers nuts. I won't "spoil" the outcome of the trial but the process was infuriating. This book full of love and full of sorrow. A beautiful tribute to his daughter but also a shameful example of how our legal system seems twisted out of shape.
October 1, 2010
It was hard to read this book objectively because I was one of the attorneys involved in the case. A heart-wrenching event that never got better in all the lawsuits. I really did feel bad for the author.
December 17, 2018
This book is written by a father who lost his daughter, her husband and their two daughters in a car accident. It explains the events before and after their passing.
The book is split into three parts. The first part is in the daughter, Kate's, point of view and includes a summary of her life leading up to and ending at the car crash. The second part was in the point of view of William, the author, and told the story of the family finding out about the deaths. I found the writing style in these parts to be quite detached. It was very hard to feel any emotion or connection to Kate and William.
The third part highlights the war between the lawyers and judges over the issue of their deaths. This part was slightly interesting although I didn't really understand much of it.
Overall I don't understand why this author has so many books published. His writing style is very unengaging and quite dead. Frankly, it's very difficult to read. I definitely won't be picking up his books again any time soon.
The book is split into three parts. The first part is in the daughter, Kate's, point of view and includes a summary of her life leading up to and ending at the car crash. The second part was in the point of view of William, the author, and told the story of the family finding out about the deaths. I found the writing style in these parts to be quite detached. It was very hard to feel any emotion or connection to Kate and William.
The third part highlights the war between the lawyers and judges over the issue of their deaths. This part was slightly interesting although I didn't really understand much of it.
Overall I don't understand why this author has so many books published. His writing style is very unengaging and quite dead. Frankly, it's very difficult to read. I definitely won't be picking up his books again any time soon.
March 14, 2009
A heartrenching story of a family's encounter with the legal system in Oregon. The tremendous impact of the field burning farmers and their lobby and their collusion with state government in allowing this horrendous practice to continue. FOR SHAME OREGON!!! I will never look at Oregon holly-er-than-thou stance on the environment in the same way ever again. Read this book and spread the word. Then make noise and vote with what you know is true. Corporate America is just taking us all for a long trip down the road to corruption. We go blindly. Meanwhile, the big business saves a few pennies at the expense of our lives and the quality of our lives.
April 25, 2009
I have loved William Wharton since he stole my heart with Birdy. He breaks it now with his own true story. I loved the way he used the voice of his daughter to allow us to know her fully. His images of bereavement are so clear and direct that we know grief even if we have never personally experienced it. Taking photographs in the morgue is something I did in this book for the first time, and can only hope it will also be the last. It was brutal, loving, passionate, and nearly obsessive.
August 29, 2014
Having lost an adult child to cancer, I read this book with great interest. I understood the author's anger and his desire to make public the cause of his family's horrific death. I was pulling for him throughout the impersonal legal process. I wish it had ended differently, that he had been able to stop a practice that destroyed people's lives.
February 3, 2008
I read this book a second time recently. It's very intense and quite sad. However I was not able to put it down. Wharton wrote "Birdy". Between that book and this one, I decided to set out and read all of his books. I ended really enjoying them all.
February 11, 2008
I picked up this book by mistake and finished it in a day. Some foul librarian had put the sleve of "extra terrestrials" on it, so I was suprised when I began reading. Few lovelier and more sorrowful books read by me. Five stars because I read it in a day.
March 3, 2009
A memoir written about William's daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren who died in a 22-car pile-up on Highway 5 in Oregon. Great, heart-breaking true story.
November 20, 2019
This is a very difficult book to read. There were tears streaming down my face as read about Wharton and his wife learning that their daughter, two granddaughters and son-in-law were killed in a traffic crash in Oregon. The crash was the result of the smoke from a field burn that got out of control.
The author calls this a “documentary novel”. The first part he writes in the voice of Kate, his dead daughter. The rest is written from his own point of view including his assumptions of others’ thoughts and motivations.
I am an Oregonian and at the time of the tragedy, I was the mother of two children, one of whom was still small enough to be strapped in a car seat. Besides the the deaths of Wharton’s family. There were other deaths and injuries. The horrific descriptions of a child who was ejected and subsequently run over by another vehicle and another mother pulling her children still strapped in their seats from a burning car and handing them to bystanders has stayed with me these many years.
I did not remember the legal settlements. I think Wharton was correct that the settlements stifled the coverage and pressure from the seed growers kept the legislative response minimal.
Field burning as happened at this time is now rare. Farmers have come up with other ways of “cleansing” their fields including a machine that scorches the stubble under conditions that, hopefully, does not set the field on fire or generate much smoke.
The author calls this a “documentary novel”. The first part he writes in the voice of Kate, his dead daughter. The rest is written from his own point of view including his assumptions of others’ thoughts and motivations.
I am an Oregonian and at the time of the tragedy, I was the mother of two children, one of whom was still small enough to be strapped in a car seat. Besides the the deaths of Wharton’s family. There were other deaths and injuries. The horrific descriptions of a child who was ejected and subsequently run over by another vehicle and another mother pulling her children still strapped in their seats from a burning car and handing them to bystanders has stayed with me these many years.
I did not remember the legal settlements. I think Wharton was correct that the settlements stifled the coverage and pressure from the seed growers kept the legislative response minimal.
Field burning as happened at this time is now rare. Farmers have come up with other ways of “cleansing” their fields including a machine that scorches the stubble under conditions that, hopefully, does not set the field on fire or generate much smoke.
May 22, 2024
I ended up not having a lot of patience for this book. It caught my interest because it's the "true" story of what is probably Oregon's worst ever field burn-related traffic accident and I remember when it happened. I thought this would shed some light on the event but it ended up being frustrating due to the author's too-personal approach.
The book is separated into three sections, Kate, Will, and Settlement. Kate is the author's daughter, who burned to death along with her husband and children in a quarter-mile long 20+ car pileup on I-5 near Salem in the summer of 1988. But he doesn't just tell us about Kate, he adopts her voice and tells her story in first-person, as if he is privy to all of her thoughts and feelings. I'm thinking maybe he does know as much as he claims about her sex life because he apparently interrogated her pretty hard on the subject prior to her divorcing her first husband, suggesting that she stay with him as long as they're still having sex regularly and she's having orgasms, but I so much didn't want to read her father putting those words in his dead daughter's mouth. I came out of Part 1 feeling like I didn't know Kate very well at all, but her dad's super creepy.
This section ends with Kate's final thoughts before she dies, which are purely conjecture. We know that a semi-truck ran up over the back of their borrowed VW van, probably killing the babies instantly, and causing it to catch fire. We know that they were driving in near total darkness at that point, and other collisions had already occurred ahead. What the author claims to know and cannot, is that the truck driver was tailgating for miles, flashing his lights at the VW to try to make them speed up, and refusing to back down at all when driving into the smoke. He makes it sound as if the truck driver ran them down on purpose, a conclusion for which there is no evidence whatsoever. He even tells us that his son in law, William/Bert/Burt, was as scared as Kate to be driving on the freeway because everyone was going 70 mph. But W/B/B was born and raised in Oregon and drove that freeway all his adult life, so 70 probably felt as normal to him as it did everyone else. That's my own conjecture, but given the other bizarre generalizations* Mr. Wharton makes during his one and only visit to my home state, I feel more qualified to speak on this.
The second part, Will, seems to be about the author himself, although that is also the name of Kate's son with her first husband, and apparently also her second husband's name (I Googled a lot after reading). In the book, Husband #2 is alternately referred to as Burt or Bert. Their last name is also changed for some reason. But I'm betting it's meant to refer to the author because this section is even more about him than the first, focusing on himself through his own eyes instead of his daughter's. Here we see him get the news at his home in France, and then call everyone he knows to pass it on in the same words, repeated ad nauseum, including instructions not to try to attend the funeral. Friends, siblings, aunts and uncles, his surviving children, all under orders not to waste money traveling to the pointless stupid meaningless funeral that they shouldn't even be having because what good even are they? Funerals suck and are useless. (Also weddings. And they're basically the same thing.) Of course his surviving daughter goes anyway to say goodbye to her sister, because she's always been a stubborn brat who has to have her own way.
But before the pointless ceremony of grief and closure, he takes William/Bert/Burt's brother to the funeral home in Dallas (which he hopes was named before the TV show; yes, Mr. Wharton, Dallas Oregon existed prior to 1978 and if it worries you that much you could have fucking looked it up) to take multiple rolls of film of the charred remains of his smashed and broken family. However they screw up the camera settings, resulting in no useable photos, and have to do it again.
Why?
Part 3: Settlement. People must be sued, and if you want to maximize the dollar award, it helps to have 35mm color closeups of a 2 year old with the top of her head sliced off. However he was unable to make the Great State of Oregon, where he spent 5 minutes and noticed "only one small hill" (a geological curiosity he was sure Kate, with her knowledge of geology, would have found fascinating), ban field burning entirely, so the money is worth nothing and his family died in vain. It doesn't matter that even then burning near highways was rare, and has been even more so since the early 90s. A self-obsessed man suffered a terrible loss, and yet the fact that the laws of an entire state somehow failed to bend to his will in reparation seems to be the real tragedy for him.
I'm not even going to get into his fantasy "dream" in which William/Bert/Burt tells him what it's like to be dead and to avenge them by cancelling field burning. The fact is everyone dies in vain. Most of us just learn to live with it. Mr. Wharton has already cashed in twice so he doesn't need my sympathy. That's reserved for the dead woman and her babies, for their deaths and for the pathetic, shameful way their father and grandfather exposed every private fragment of their beings in the pages of this tawdry book.
*That typical Oregon heat(!), "the generally flat land", everyone smells like spruce(?), Oregonians can't hold their beer, I-5 south of Salem is the worst freeway in existence, much more dangerous even than LA where no one drives as fast as 70(!!!)--the list of random generalities is endless and a bit insane.
The book is separated into three sections, Kate, Will, and Settlement. Kate is the author's daughter, who burned to death along with her husband and children in a quarter-mile long 20+ car pileup on I-5 near Salem in the summer of 1988. But he doesn't just tell us about Kate, he adopts her voice and tells her story in first-person, as if he is privy to all of her thoughts and feelings. I'm thinking maybe he does know as much as he claims about her sex life because he apparently interrogated her pretty hard on the subject prior to her divorcing her first husband, suggesting that she stay with him as long as they're still having sex regularly and she's having orgasms, but I so much didn't want to read her father putting those words in his dead daughter's mouth. I came out of Part 1 feeling like I didn't know Kate very well at all, but her dad's super creepy.
This section ends with Kate's final thoughts before she dies, which are purely conjecture. We know that a semi-truck ran up over the back of their borrowed VW van, probably killing the babies instantly, and causing it to catch fire. We know that they were driving in near total darkness at that point, and other collisions had already occurred ahead. What the author claims to know and cannot, is that the truck driver was tailgating for miles, flashing his lights at the VW to try to make them speed up, and refusing to back down at all when driving into the smoke. He makes it sound as if the truck driver ran them down on purpose, a conclusion for which there is no evidence whatsoever. He even tells us that his son in law, William/Bert/Burt, was as scared as Kate to be driving on the freeway because everyone was going 70 mph. But W/B/B was born and raised in Oregon and drove that freeway all his adult life, so 70 probably felt as normal to him as it did everyone else. That's my own conjecture, but given the other bizarre generalizations* Mr. Wharton makes during his one and only visit to my home state, I feel more qualified to speak on this.
The second part, Will, seems to be about the author himself, although that is also the name of Kate's son with her first husband, and apparently also her second husband's name (I Googled a lot after reading). In the book, Husband #2 is alternately referred to as Burt or Bert. Their last name is also changed for some reason. But I'm betting it's meant to refer to the author because this section is even more about him than the first, focusing on himself through his own eyes instead of his daughter's. Here we see him get the news at his home in France, and then call everyone he knows to pass it on in the same words, repeated ad nauseum, including instructions not to try to attend the funeral. Friends, siblings, aunts and uncles, his surviving children, all under orders not to waste money traveling to the pointless stupid meaningless funeral that they shouldn't even be having because what good even are they? Funerals suck and are useless. (Also weddings. And they're basically the same thing.) Of course his surviving daughter goes anyway to say goodbye to her sister, because she's always been a stubborn brat who has to have her own way.
But before the pointless ceremony of grief and closure, he takes William/Bert/Burt's brother to the funeral home in Dallas (which he hopes was named before the TV show; yes, Mr. Wharton, Dallas Oregon existed prior to 1978 and if it worries you that much you could have fucking looked it up) to take multiple rolls of film of the charred remains of his smashed and broken family. However they screw up the camera settings, resulting in no useable photos, and have to do it again.
Why?
Part 3: Settlement. People must be sued, and if you want to maximize the dollar award, it helps to have 35mm color closeups of a 2 year old with the top of her head sliced off. However he was unable to make the Great State of Oregon, where he spent 5 minutes and noticed "only one small hill" (a geological curiosity he was sure Kate, with her knowledge of geology, would have found fascinating), ban field burning entirely, so the money is worth nothing and his family died in vain. It doesn't matter that even then burning near highways was rare, and has been even more so since the early 90s. A self-obsessed man suffered a terrible loss, and yet the fact that the laws of an entire state somehow failed to bend to his will in reparation seems to be the real tragedy for him.
I'm not even going to get into his fantasy "dream" in which William/Bert/Burt tells him what it's like to be dead and to avenge them by cancelling field burning. The fact is everyone dies in vain. Most of us just learn to live with it. Mr. Wharton has already cashed in twice so he doesn't need my sympathy. That's reserved for the dead woman and her babies, for their deaths and for the pathetic, shameful way their father and grandfather exposed every private fragment of their beings in the pages of this tawdry book.
*That typical Oregon heat(!), "the generally flat land", everyone smells like spruce(?), Oregonians can't hold their beer, I-5 south of Salem is the worst freeway in existence, much more dangerous even than LA where no one drives as fast as 70(!!!)--the list of random generalities is endless and a bit insane.
March 1, 2023
This is an almost unbearably sad account in 3 parts of a catastrophic accident and the tragic death of William Wharton daughter and her family. This is the sort of memoir that I would be instinctly drawn to but I felt the balance didn't work for me given that so much was taken up in the account of the almost unbelievable settlement cases. This last third would make a powerful condemnation of the mentality of the American culture of suing everyone you can think off. But I'm not entirely sure quite how I felt reading it in juxtaposition to the beautifully personal story of loss.
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August 9, 2016Beyond moving...
March 7, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews