half_a_life PeeT Early in Darin Strauss’s first novel, “Chang and Eng,” a historical tale about conjoined twins born in Siam in 1811, Eng awakes to find that Chang has died in the night. “Then I too am done,” Eng thinks. The two men’s lives have been entwined almost beyond imagining, and one cannot survive without the other. Eng clings to his dead twin, then dies himself. It is impossible not to think of this moment, which appears once at the beginning and again near the end of the novel, when reading Strauss’s new memoir, “Half a Life.” At 18, Strauss was behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile with some high school friends in tow, on their way to play miniature golf near his suburban Long Island home. It was a month before the end of his senior year in high school — a time of optimism, as Strauss writes: “Your future rarely feels so present as it does in this June of your prime.” He was set to go to Tufts in the fall. The day was clear, visibility excellent. He drove the legal speed limit. He wasn’t drunk or high. He saw a group of girls riding bicycles on the side of the road, and in the next moment, inexplicably, one swerved across two lanes and in front of his car. Her name was Celine ­Zilke, and she was 16 years old, a junior at his high school. “So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable,” Strauss writes. But on that spring day, the irrevocable slammed into the worlds of the 18-year-old boy and the 16-year-old girl. Life changed in a flash so fast that he would never be able to summon the moment fully. She was dead, and he had killed her. What life delivers to us forms us all, but as surely as random and sometimes monstrous events shape our lives, so too does our response to those events. Something happens, something tragic, immutable and unfair (whatever that means). So what are we going to do? Cave in? Become controlling, rageful? Shut down? Live lives of quiet desperation? At the center of this elegant, painful, stunningly honest memoir thrums a question fundamental to what it means to be human: What do we do with what we’ve been given? Strauss went to Celine’s funeral, where he received a hug — “a clenching of her body, a steeling herself for something personally odious” — from Celine’s mother. “ ‘I know it was not your fault, Darin. They all tell me it was not your fault. . . . But I want you to remember something. Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well now.’ Her voice went dim. ‘Because you are living it for two people.’ Her face was a picture of the misery that had worn out the voice. ‘Can you promise me? Promise.’ ” Strauss nodded. Though he didn’t know it at the time — there was much he didn’t know, much that he pushed away, ducked and avoided in an attempt to outrun his identity as that kid, the one who killed a girl — he would spend his life doing exactly what Celine’s mother had commanded. A lazy, underachieving and under-read student in high school, Strauss began to develop academic interests in college. He saw Tufts as a witness protection program of sorts, and told none of his new friends what had happened. “My accident was the deepest part of my life, and the second-­deepest was hiding it.” Besides, Celine never got to go to college. He thought about Celine constantly, as he would for many years. These thoughts ranged from the mundane (removing a soda from its case at the Mini Mart, “while my fingers closed around the damp, solid aluminum, I would think: Celine Zilke will never feel a can in her grip again”) to the profound (“I’d later think of Celine at my wedding and when my wife told me that she was pregnant. Name an experience: it’s a good bet I’ve thought of Celine while experiencing it”). The accident slowly carved Strauss from the inside out, remaking whoever he might have become had he taken a different route on that spring day, or sped up at a yellow light, or been in a different lane. It is a testament to his strength of character that the adult he grew up to be, one can’t help thinking, is wiser, more thoughtful, kinder, though undoubtedly also more tortured, than the one he might otherwise have been. But reviews of memoirs often assess the writer rather than the book, as if it is the moral character and not the telling of the story that matters. Strauss’s strength of character isn’t what makes “Half a Life” a good book. What is truly exceptional here is watching a writer of fine fiction (“Chang and Eng” was followed by the novels “The Real McCoy” and “More Than It Hurts You”) probe, directly, carefully and with great humility, the source from which his fiction springs. “I’d written three novels without laying a hand on the subject,” he writes: “historical and contemporary, first-person and third-, different fictional stories chiseled from the same real story.” Strauss tells us that he didn’t want to write an accident memoir, didn’t want to become “one more person creating an entertainment out of misfortune.” There’s no getting around the fact that this is a memoir about an accident and its aftermath. There’s plenty of drama in “Half a Life.” The Zilke family, despite reassurances that they didn’t blame him for their daughter’s death, ended up suing Strauss for millions of dollars, a development that a showier, more manipulative writer might have mined for suspense. Strauss endured a severe stomach ailment that seemed to be a direct result of his continuing guilt and stress. An episode with a Judd Hirsch-like shrink would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and painful. His dating life — until meeting his wife — was rife with doubts about whether and when to share his secret. But Strauss is not a showy writer, and “Half a Life” is not trivial entertainment of any kind. I was struck by a tiny word at the beginning of a passage midway through: “We’d had the accident at the age when your identity is pretty much up for grabs. Before it, I hadn’t been so introspective; I’d had nothing to introspect about.” Rarely has the word we been so huge and so heartbreaking. It was their accident. A girl died, and the boy who killed her also died that day. In his place grew a man who heeded the words of that girl’s grieving mother, and in so doing, became a writer who returns to that moment again and again, attempting to reshape the irrevocable, searching for truth and meaning, if not solace, in the spot where the wound will never heal. ~ny times read this book. oh my god. 111201 what's it to you? who go blather from