Half a Life by Darin Strauss, Hamish Hamilton, $26.95
“Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” She was just 16. Darin Strauss, the author of this memoir and also an acclaimed novelist, was 18 and soberly driving his father’s Oldsmobile when a freak accident – a girl, a bike, an inexplicable collision – changed everything.
This short book is about a young man who does the unthinkable – then spends the next half of his life thinking about it deeply and agonisingly. “Living for two people”, as the dead girl’s parents say he must though, they swear, they don’t blame him. And later sue him for millions of dollars. Though really, Strauss inflicts the worst punishment on himself.
The quality of the writing and ruthless examination of his own motives and conduct save it from being morbid; it is more the story of what could happen to anyone. Only in his late 30s does he manage to turn a crippling tragedy into a hard fact he can live with, and how he achieves this is quietly uplifting.
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