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Reviews for Half a Life

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  • In the aftermath of an accident where someone dies, how do you live a full life?4

    Julie Smith In 1988, the author was 18 years old, riding in his car with friends, when a bicyclist turned in front of him. That bicyclist turned out to be Celine Zilke, a 16-year-old schoolmate, who died from her injuries.

    In this astonishingly frank memoir, Mr. Straus captures, at first in flash bursts of memory (the accident and its immediate aftermath) that bring the reader straight into the shock he experienced, and then in more fleshed-out form, how an accident at such a young age shapes his life and his thoughts about himself - why does it feel wrong to take pleasure in anything? SHOULD he take pleasure in anything? What does it say about him when he actually FORGETS about what happened for a day or two? As he goes on with his life, sometimes he gets hit with tears at random moments - commercials, etc., but mainly, as the years go by and the accident becomes a faded memory, he finds himself scarcely affected by it at all. Then he remembers, and he feels as though he SHOULD feel more .. more guilt, more sadness for a girl he barely knew.

    I was caught up in this one; it smacks of hard truths. Not a guilt-ridden account, it felt REAL ... the way many of us would feel after an accident that wasn't our own fault. Someone else died, but YOU still lived, and how do you cope with that and have a meaningful life? How do you life a life that makes up for the life you took? Or do you only deserve to live half a life?

    QUOTES (from an ARC; may be different in final copy):


    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.

    I didn't understand that everyone's tepid emotions were reasonable. The panicky little drum that kept me going required that this event, this death, be epochal. Of course, it was that: this was an incomprehensibly sad occurrence for our school, our town. But I didn't yet know that there are some truths - that even young people die occasionally; that there's only so much gnashing of teeth and weeping over another person's tragedy - there are some truths that only come to us softened by beautiful stratagems of self-deception.

    I thought what it might mean not to have a life. (I didn't get very far on that one. What could it mean? It was absence: what was Celine not experiencing, not thinking about, not planning?) I thought I would powerfully if gradually rise above despair. I thought maybe I still didn't feel the right amount of despair. I thought how do you calculate a sum like that?

    BOOK RATING: 4 out of 5 stars by Julie Smith

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