Off the Shelf
A Memoir That Turns Tragedy Into Poetry By Adam Bertocci | Thursday, June 12, 2014
I didn’t even think it was a memoir at first. The copy of Half a Life I plucked from my library shelf was a tiny maroon hardcover with only half a dust jacket. It looked kind of like a poetry collection. In a sense, I could have judged it from its cover, because Half a Life is as much poetry as memoir, for me; it’s that rare piece of serious nonfiction where the writing, not the subject, is the star. It didn’t surprise me to learn that Darin Strauss is primarily a literary novelist.
Just take this paragraph, which appears all by itself against a blank facing page—one would be forgiven for thinking it a prose poem: “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.” Strauss is hardly the first to use an overloaded-switchboard metaphor. He knows that, and he knows that making the comparison alone isn’t writing. He doesn’t just tell us to think of a switchboard, he conjures one up in our minds. Now read the words aloud. They’re lovely. They just flow.
So why was Strauss in shock? Because shortly after turning eighteen, he struck and killed a schoolmate.
He was driving safely. She was on a bicycle; she swerved in front of him across two lanes without warning and without explanation. At every turn he is exonerated, yet nothing changes the fact that she died and he was behind the wheel. His memoir recounts the accident, the legal aftermath, the guilt and all the little things one might not expect to come with this strange territory. “Things don’t go away. They become you,” Strauss observes. In seven simple words, a truth. -
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