Review: Half A Life, A Memoir By NYU Professor Darin Strauss
By Madeline Paumen
Long before he was a Clinical Associate Professor of Writing at NYU, Darin Strauss was 18 and poised on the brink of that blessed event — graduation. In June of his senior year, Strauss was driving in his native Long Island with some buddies when he hit and killed a girl on a bicycle. Her name was Celine, and she was two years and one school grade younger than Strauss. He knew her — they went to the same high school and had even shared a class together. And thus begins Strauss’s stark, straightforward reflection on the event that happened “half [a] life ago,” and irrevocably altered it.
Strauss recounts how Celine’s death affected him, starting with the accident and ending at the present in Half A Life, which was recently named a National Books Critics Circle Finalist. In this space of time, he attended Tufts, was sued by Celine’s parents, met his future wife, went to his ten-year high school reunion, and tried to find logic in and cope with Celine’s death, while simultaneously knowing that finding closure would be elusive, if not impossible. He turns the memories of the accident and its aftermath inside out and upside down, tearing them to pieces and dissecting them carefully, always on edge, always unsure, always sad. At the book’s crux, Strauss asks this essential question of himself and of his readers: how do we deal with what we’ve been given?
Half A Life’s blessing is in its curse: it is exceptionally honest, and, at times, painfully so. The book prides itself on portraying events in the purest, most simple way Strauss knows how. He does not exclude the actions or traits that make him seem less than admirable in his circumstances. We understand the confusing conflict between what Strauss instinctively feels and how he thinks he should feel, and sympathize with his strange version of survivor’s guilt; as opposed to feeling guilty he was alive, Strauss felt guilty that he was glad to be alive.
However, it still falls into some common traps of personal narrative. Car accidents are in the same category as devastating break-ups and close family deaths — when it hasn’t happened to you, it’s hard to care in anything more than a superficial way. Strauss shows us a perspective on a situation that only a handful of people know firsthand, so we feel we can’t question his viewpoint. When it comes to Strauss’s emotions, we get it, but most of the time we don’t really feel it. He never victimizes himself or asks for the reader’s sympathy. Despite this, the story often comes across as self-indulgent — there is a sense that the memoir itself was part of Strauss’s infinite healing process, getting it all out there on paper in an attempt to put the pieces together in a way that fits better.
In the Burroughs-Frey-Walls world where a steady stream of memoirs floods the shelves, it’s difficult to find subject matter that is engaging and not stale. Half A Life teeters in the balance occasionally, but the scale is usually tipped in its favor. It is fraught with the complexities of chance, blame, and examines living in the wake of grief that is always brimming near the surface. Strauss has produced a memoir that is poignant, clear-cut, and beautifully written.
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