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opentopersuasion's review
4.0
Sometimes in life there are these turning points--a traumatic event or a horrible mistake--that change the course of your life forever. Maybe you could have avoided it. Maybe not. Maybe it was a regretful decision you made, or something that just happened. But either way, there is some serious trauma that shades all the moments after it, and that anchors you there, so that you will always come back to it, every day, almost reflexively.
This is what happened to Darin Strauss. At the age of eighteen, just barely a young man, he struck and killed a girl with his car. He was not at fault, he could not have swerved, she was cycling and rode straight into his oncoming car. She died, and because of that, Strauss was wracked with guilt for the next eighteen years, half a life later. The guilt is still there even now--but it is managed into a small point versus the giant bubble that he lived in for so long.
This book resonated with me intensely. If you have ever had a moment like that--a precipice in your life, where after that moment everything changed--you will recognize yourself in him. Written honestly, the book is sad but poignant. I think most people would react as Strauss did, which makes it all the more emotionally
This is what happened to Darin Strauss. At the age of eighteen, just barely a young man, he struck and killed a girl with his car. He was not at fault, he could not have swerved, she was cycling and rode straight into his oncoming car. She died, and because of that, Strauss was wracked with guilt for the next eighteen years, half a life later. The guilt is still there even now--but it is managed into a small point versus the giant bubble that he lived in for so long.
This book resonated with me intensely. If you have ever had a moment like that--a precipice in your life, where after that moment everything changed--you will recognize yourself in him. Written honestly, the book is sad but poignant. I think most people would react as Strauss did, which makes it all the more emotionally
emdub's review
3.0
In 2009, my family experienced several terrible events. Ours were very different than Darin Strauss's experience, but every person carries their own tragedies, and for several years, I've been carrying mine. Reading this book, about how to live, or not live, after something world-changing happens, and feeling that others in the world knew what it was like to be absolutely stupefied that life could just go on while you were standing still and watching it pass, filled some places in me that had been torn open and aching for a long time.
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