Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

  The Complicated Grief Disorder sadness-playback treatment I mention in the book—in fact, the whole glut of post-traumatic stress disorder cures—bundles together a lot of what’s in the air, a lot of fashionable concerns, but no morality. The PTSD cure’s dutiful enthusiasm about the stems and blooms of depression and guilt may remind cynics of Ludovico’s Technique, from A Clockwork Orange. (A sadistic criminal is made to watch violent images as he’s given an emetic.) Ludovico’s works, our dire narrator is cleansed—his ethical will is pulled up by the roots—and we’re left in a world of absolution, but no justice.

  As I wound down this essay, it just so happened—a correctness that seemed as heartbreaking as it was rigid—that I caught a scene of Clockwork’s Alex, his eyes wired open to Ludovico’s scrupulous brutalities.

  One thing not addressed in most self-help is whether the person deserves to get better. Pop psych is no place for ethical quandaries—just the certainty of one’s own stainless right to feel good. All I can say about this is: I’ve tried very hard to avoid any sort of reflexive justification here—to avoid putting my thumb in the scale. That’s why I’ve offered up as many unflattering disclosures as I could remember. (Going to the movies the day of the accident, for Christ’s sake?) I tried my best to make sure what you hold in your hands isn’t just some brief for the defense. Now it’s up to you, I guess, to see if I succeeded.

  IV

  A friend of mine recently had to pull off to the side of his life. His mother fell unexpectedly, deathly ill. He moved to his family home to care for her. He knew this would be very hard. The difficulty, the cost to his mind and heart, topped even what he had braced himself for.

  His mother was dying in front of him—in all the physical messiness and gagged intimacies of a drawn-out death. Helping the mother die was exhausting, sad, constant work. And the truth was, she was going to die anyway. My friend learned that it was also true that he could handle this bleak work. And that he owed it to her to handle it. To her, and to himself.

  I asked this friend if I could mention him here. His response: “It sounds lame to say that hearing your story changed my life but it kind of did. Just knowing someone else has gone through something and made it out. And if you put my story in your book, then maybe some other reader will be affected by that. And so my mother’s story will be in some small way knitted with that person’s story, as well as your story, and my story. And so on.”

  Morally passionate, passionately moral writing (Wallace again) ideally helps readers feel less alone. That may read as puffed up and kitschy. But it’s what I was trying to do here: to be faithful to the memory of Celine, and to all those generous, sharing emails. And so what had started as a personal account of an atypical recovery—basically, of my own fuck-ups and slow learning—has opened for a lot of people into a universal story of how to live with steep grief and unwarranted guilt. And with the running back and forth between shock and anguish—which is shock’s finger-pointing offspring. People find their stories easier to live through when they hear other people’s stories.

  This is how my friend goes about the care of his dying mother: he rises each morning and chops the wood, and carries the water. And he’s going to be okay.

  1. Please don’t take me as ungracious just because discussing these emails affects my stomach like twelve hours on a trembling airplane. I’d been warned by other novelists turned memoirists, Oh, you’ll be overwhelmed, non-fiction’s quite different, readers won’t respect boundaries, etc. All this turned out to be true. But true in a way that struck me as profound and thrilling, even beautiful. I started up email relationships with a number of readers. But because these relationships are based only on awkward personal revelations, they’re delicate. So delicate I’m afraid that, like shadows, they’ll die if I shine much light on them here.

  A CONVERSATION WITH DARIN STRAUSS

  Colum McCann is the author of the novels Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two story collections. He won the National Book Award in 2009, has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing program.

  Colum McCann: They say all stories are the same. Of course this can’t be true. The poem doesn’t swerve and suddenly become a thriller. The playwright doesn’t necessarily know how to begin a rhyme. Can you discuss the challenges that face a novelist who switches to memoir?

  Darin Strauss: My training and my inclination is to invent. Memoir was in some ways an easier form (you skip the hard, dreaming-stuff-up work) and in some ways more difficult (wait, you can’t just dream stuff up?). The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever’s interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom. So, had this been a novel, I would’ve made the court case more steeply dramatic, for example. I couldn’t, of course.

  But something about the exercise feels, for lack of a better word, pure. Trying only to remember what had happened—but exactly as it happened—and being reverent to the facts: trying to make something artful of that.

  The challenge is being true and respectful and stylish, at once.

  CM: Which it is. It all comes down to language, the holy word put in the right place. It seems to me that when a writer is working honestly the story finds the right language for itself. It’s somewhat mystical. Yet you have to work hard to create the possibility of this happening. And so it seems to me that it’s about stamina and desire, listening for the right music.

  DS: Exactly: Babel’s famous, heart-piercing period. You mention the mystical. I shy from occult descriptions of what we do at the keyboard. But a sense does come—a frizzle that says each book teaches you how to write it. It’s different every time, and always requires a mix of inspiration and ass-in-the-chair time. Writing has somehow to involve both a slow patience and a thunderbolt.

  CM: This book is full of thunderbolts—wonderful subtle strikes of weather. Everybody is going to want to know if you had ever considered fictionalizing it.

  DS: Thanks. But I’d never considered writing it at all. I thought the accident was going to be my lifelong secret, the past I wouldn’t let poke into the now. I told almost nobody. Writing began only when we had our twins, when I realized the accident happened half my life ago: impending fatherhood tends to focus the mind. I felt with new force that I’d never be able to feel it all—never truly comprehend just how awful the Zilkes’ loss must have been. I wrote merely as a way to take hold of my thoughts about this. (I write to figure out how I feel and what I know about something; I imagine you’re the same way.) So the book started as a little therapy project, and has ended up with me talking to you here. Which still feels strange to me—the big secret as participatory event.

  CM: Do you think the accident, or your knowledge of the accident, had influenced your fiction in other ways? In the word choice, in the movement of the characters on the page?

  DS: Hmm. There is something numinous about writing, something beyond craftsman-y. (We don’t discuss this when we teach.) And so I’m wary even now of exploring it. Let’s leave a few of the seven veils in place.

  CM: You write, “My accident was the deepest part of my life, and the second-deepest was hiding it.”

  DS: I have a lot of friends who found out about my accident—the death, the lifelong guilt—only through the book, or the excerpts in GQ or on This American Life. So it was strange; people resented my silence. But I just really wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  CM: Now you’re not only talking about it, but you’re making sense of it for others. You’re deepening its meaning but also its implications. How much do you consider it to be a project that you wrote for, say, your own children when they get a chance to read it? Does that idea frighten you?

  DS: Colum, I don’t know how your
work intersects your family life. For me, I simply can’t wonder how they (my kids, Susannah, my parents, any one particular reader) will respond. That would trip me up at the first word. I may have in mind a Platonic audience: me but smarter, free of prejudice, open, book lovers with a lot of time on their hands, Nabokov’s dictionary by their side, etc. And—though I never thought of it before—I guess I see this perfect reader as an adult. (My sons are now three.) All the same, I am anxious for my kids to read this. When do I show it to them? Will it be upsetting? These are the unknowns.

  CM: Yes, but they’re also the beauties. My guess is that your children will thank you for it. They will say you are a better father for having muscled up to tell the truth.

  DS: It’s kind of you to say. But my feeling is: I spent eighteen years shrinking from the truth. Sure, I finally knocked at the door of guilt with somewhat decisive knuckles. This strikes me, in itself, as not especially praiseworthy. I don’t mean to say it’s blameworthy. It’s neither one or the other—probably it’s midway along the cowardice-bravery continuum. Now, I am proud of how the book turned out; but I’ve gotten too much public credit just for the attempt. All the same, I do feel lucky that when I knocked, the door opened.

  CM: How did your having written about it—this therapy project of yours—change the way you thought about the accident?

  DS: You know, Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night as a response to an article in Time. He thought the reporter had misrepresented his (Mailer’s) behavior during an anti-Vietnam march. So Mailer begins his Armies by reprinting the entire Time article, and then there’s this: “Now we may leave Time to find out what happened.” The resultant book is a four-hundred-page letter to the editor.

  I found myself with the same frustration, the same impulse, raised to a higher power. How crassly my local newspaper had portrayed the accident! As if the sadness quotient depended on Celine’s having been the most popular kid, the class pretty girl, some kind of prom superstar. I felt protective of the real her, who had been made 2-D by the reporter, simplified into something she wasn’t. In fact, maybe that’s where my fiction training came into play—knowing how to return nuance to the story, and chiaroscuro. At least, I hope it did. I left the pages of Newsday to write what really happened.

  CM: Can you talk about the relation between the earlier works of fiction and this book? Similarities of voice, or perspective? Despite that this is a memoir and that those are novels, you wrote them all. They’re all Darin Strauss books. Can you find commonalities in them all?

  DS: Saul Bellow once said he didn’t want ever to go to therapy, because he didn’t care to learn why he wrote what he did. Well, I’ve learned why I have. At the funeral home, Celine’s mother told me: “you are living … for two people.” My first book, Chang and Eng, was about conjoined twins—two men sharing one life. The first line is: “This is the end I have feared since we were a child.” The narrator’s both singular and plural—“we feared … I was.” Eng Bunker lived as two people and one person.

  The Real McCoy centered on a man who threw off his identity, and in coming to New York lived as an impostor. That was how I felt, having fled to the city, having told no one about my past, about who I was.

  More Than It Hurts You is about a Long Island family with a terrible secret.…

  It’s embarrassing how obviously I was writing about this incident—without my having known it.

  CM: And so now, having written it head-on, what’s the difference between examining the accident obliquely and actually facing it head-on, page-on?

  DS: One difference is: writing such non-fiction is basically a very public therapy session. As you know, you write a novel, interviewers ask about book-related points of interest. “How’d you come up with that character? What were you thinking with that plot twist?,” etc. But when you write a memoir, people ask about your state of mind. “Did writing the book help you? And how do you feel now?” It’s a very odd difference.

  CM: All right, then. So, how do you feel? I know how I felt when I first read the piece in GQ. It took my breath away. Quite literally. I remember gasping a moment. There is so much volume in a life.

  DS: There is volume in each life, and a writer tries (at least sometimes) to turn it up, the better to transcribe the noise. Most people—healthy people—work to turn it down: to find a little quiet in which to live. Maybe that’s why it’s such a weird job. (Philip Roth: “This profession even fucks up grief.”) Anyway.

  I’m of a much stronger mind than ever about it now. At least I hope I am. This profession didn’t fuck up my grief; it allowed me to feel it, and then at least to begin gesturing past it.

  In my friend David Lipsky’s excellent book with/about David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Wallace says that a small part of who he is craves fame, but that this part doesn’t get to drive. The fact that Celine died is present still in who I am—it would be inhuman if it weren’t at least in some way present forever—but it doesn’t get to drive my life. I used to wonder what would’ve happened if Celine had cut in front of a perfect driver, a Mario Andretti. Would that have been enough to save her life? I think not; I think physics dictates that nobody could have avoided her. But I now understand this Andretti vs. Strauss question is useless. She cut in front of me. And I did my best to avoid her. That’s all I can control.

  I recently heard from a friend of the girl’s—someone I never knew. She read Half a Life and told me: “Stop beating yourself up. She committed suicide. She talked and even wrote about death constantly in the week before she died.” I didn’t want to hear that—I don’t know if it’s true, and it’s also not my business. Celine around school seemed happy to me. (Though admittedly I didn’t know her well.) I did what I could to avoid hitting her, and that’s the only part that concerns me.

  All the same, when the book was about to come out, I wanted to write the parents a letter, a warning. Of course, they’d sued me after having said they knew I was blameless—and promising they would always support me. But I never blamed them for anything. (How could I? They’d lost a daughter, and I was walking around.) So I wanted to spare them the pain of being surprised by the book. But the simple act of Googling them and writing the letter was hard—harder than writing the book. It never goes fully away.

  CM: Lorca talks about the pulse of the wound that goes through to the opposite side. I suppose that’s what you’ve located. It’s a very fine piece of work indeed. More than that, it seems necessary.

  DS: This was a wound I didn’t acknowledge; I was like Samsa in the beginning of The Metamorphosis, unaware I was schlepping around with eight skinny legs and an armor-plated belly. But the messages I’ve gotten from suffering people—distress signals, really—have strengthened my faith. I was going to say in books, but in everything.

  To end on another Bellow (mis)quote, sometimes literary books believe all questions of truth have overwhelmingly formidable answers, uncongenial, hostile to us. It may be, however, that truth is not always so punitive. I learned this. There may be truths on the side of life … there may be some truths that are our friends in the universe.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Strauss includes a number of scenes (of him chatting up girls at the accident site, and of going to the movies later) that portray him in an unfavorable light. Do you think this makes him less likable, or more so? How effective is he in winning your sympathy? Do you think he wants to?

  2. It took Strauss half a life to write this book. How do you think it would have differed if he’d tried to write it at the time of the accident? How would it be different if he’d waited another eighteen years?

  3. Strauss writes that he thought of college as a “witness protection program”—he went off to school and told basically no one about the accident. Do you think this time was necessary for him to heal, or would he have benefited from talking about the accident to a lot of people right away?

 
; 4. As serious as this book is, it does include moments of humor. Strauss pokes gentle fun at “the Shrink”—a psychologist he saw soon after the crash—and at the “Death & Dying” class he took in college. What purpose do these passages serve in this often somber book?

  5. To what degree do you think Strauss’s memories were shaped by his age? How reliable is memory after almost two decades?

  6. A number of reviewers of this book wrote that, if anything, Strauss was too hard on himself in this memoir. He was found blameless, yet he spent years feeling terrible about the accident. Is that a necessary moral stance, or could he have let himself off the hook a little more?

  7. The Washington Post wrote that Half a Life has a universal appeal, calling it a “penetrating, thought-provoking examination of the human mind.” Do you think it raises larger issues beyond the immediate story of the car crash? If so, what are they?

  8. Strauss’s parents are quite present in the early part of the book, less so as the story progresses. Is this merely a function of the narrator growing older? How would you act differently if it had been your child driving that car on that fateful day?

  9. The accident resulted in a lawsuit. Do you think there is some peace of mind to be gained from litigation? Is it a way for us to try to feel better about something awful?

  10. Define the relationship between Strauss and his wife, Susannah. How does she differ from the people he’d previously told about the crash?

  11. Consider Strauss’s choice of career. He writes that, if not for the accident, he may not have become a writer. Does this seem true? Can we be shaped positively by terrible events? If so, how do we ensure that we are?