Half a Life (memoir)

Last updated
Half a Life
Half a Life (memoir).jpg
Author Darin Strauss
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Memoir
PublishedAugust 2010 McSweeney's/Random House
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages224
Awards National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
ISBN 0-8129-8253-3

Half a Life is a book by American author Darin Strauss. It received the National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir in 2011. The memoir grew out of a 2008 This American Life episode entitled "Life After Death," in which the author addressed the effects of a high school traffic accident. [1]

Contents

Summary

Strauss, a novelist, recounts how his life was profoundly altered when a car he was driving struck and killed a high school classmate. She was on a bicycle that swerved in front of his car, which struck and killed her. [1]

Although it was determined Strauss could in no way have avoided the accident, the book details his attempts, over half his life, to come to terms with his feelings of responsibility. [2]

Reception

Half a Life was enthusiastically received by critics here and abroad. Writing in The Guardian , [3] writer and critic Robert McCrum called the book "a masterpiece....'Half my life ago, I killed a girl'. You'll rarely get a better first line. What follows—Strauss's precise, honest and rigorous account of a fateful road accident and its harrowing aftermath—fulfills every hope aroused in the casual reader. What starts as an 18-year-old's carefree outing in his father's car leads to the death of Celine Zilke, a classmate, followed by a court case (this is America). Simultaneously, however, there is redemption. Crystal, and with many facets, Half a Life deserves celebration." In the Chicago Tribune, critic Elizabeth Taylor called it "a book that inspires admiration, sentence by sentence...This is memoir in its finest form." [4] Writer Dani Shapiro, in The New York Times Book Review, [5] found the memoir "elegant, painful, stunningly honest." She continued, "At the center of this memoir thrums a question fundamental to what it means to be human: What do we do with what we’ve been given?" A critical favorite in the UK, Half a Life was called "one of the best books I have ever read" by Ali Catterall on The BBC, [6] as well as "precise, elegantly written, fresh, wise, and very sad ... indicative not only of a very talented writer, but of a proper human being” by Nick Hornby [7]

Half a Life was widely excerpted in venues such as GQ , This American Life , United Kingdom papers The Times and Daily Mail .

Awards

Half a Life received the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. [8]

Related Research Articles

<i>On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft</i> 2000 memoir by Steven King

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a memoir by American author Stephen King that describes his experiences as a writer and his advice for aspiring writers. Originally published in 2000 by Charles Scribner's Sons, On Writing is King's first book after he was involved in a car accident a year earlier. Scribner later republished the memoir twice, in 2010 and 2020. The 10th anniversary edition featured an updated reading list from King; whereas the 20th anniversary edition includes contributions from King's two sons, Joe Hill and Owen.

Philip Roth American novelist (1933–2018)

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer.

National Book Critics Circle Award Annual American literary awards

The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English". The first NBCC awards were announced and presented January 16, 1976.

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."

James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture.

Darin Strauss

Darin Strauss is a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's 2011 book Half a Life, won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography. His most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday, came out in August, 2020. It is currently nominated for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.

<i>Dreams from My Father</i> Book by Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago until his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. He had been elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. According to The New York Times, Obama modeled Dreams from My Father on Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man.

Tim Page (music critic) American journalist (born 1954)

Tim Page is an American writer, music critic, editor, producer and professor who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism for The Washington Post. Anthony Tommasini, the chief music critic for The New York Times, has praised Page's criticism for its "extensive knowledge of cultural history, especially literature; the instincts and news sense of a sharp beat reporter; the skills of a good storyteller; infectious inquisitiveness; immunity to dogma; and an always-running pomposity detector." Other notable writings by Page include his biography of the novelist Dawn Powell, which is credited for helping to spark the revival of Powell's work, and a memoir that chronicles growing up with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder.

Dani Shapiro American writer

Dani Shapiro is an American writer, the author of five novels including Family History (2003) and Black & White (2007) and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion (1998), Devotion (2010), Hourglass (2017), and Inheritance (2019). Her new novel, Signal Fires, will publish by Knopf in fall 2022. She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and Elle. In February 2019, she created an original podcast on iHeart Radio called Family Secrets.

Vance Nye Bourjaily was an American novelist, playwright, journalist, creative writing teacher, and essayist.

Benjamin Taylor (author)

Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.

Susan Shapiro

Susan Shapiro is the American author of 17 books, including The Byline Bible,Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Only as Good as Your Word, Lighting Up, Speed Shrinking, and What's Never Said, and coauthor of The Bosnia List and the New York Times bestseller Unhooked.

<i>Wild</i> (memoir) Book by Cheryl Strayed

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is the 2012 memoir by the American writer, author, and podcaster Cheryl Strayed. The memoir describes Strayed's 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995 as a journey of self-discovery. The book reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

Claire Dederer is an American writer who regularly contributes essays, reviews and criticism to well-known publications, including The New York Times. She has also authored two books, Love and Trouble and Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses.Poser was a New York Times best seller.

Joanna Rakoff is an American novelist and memoirist.

<i>Chang & Eng</i> (novel) Book by Darin Strauss

Chang & Eng is a book by American author Darin Strauss, published in 2000. It was a nominee for multiple awards, including the Pen Hemingway, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the New York Public Library's Literary Lions Award, and a winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award.

Piri Halasz is an American art critic, educator and writer.

<i>Men We Reaped</i> 2013 memoir by Jesmyn Ward

Men We Reaped is a memoir by the African-American writer Jesmyn Ward. The book was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. The memoir focuses on Ward's own personal history and the deaths of five Black men in her life over a four-year span. Men We Reaped won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

<i>A Promised Land</i> 2020 memoir by Barack Obama

A Promised Land is a memoir by Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Published on November 17, 2020, it is the first of a planned two-volume series. Remaining focused on his political career, the presidential memoir documents Obama's life from his early years through the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The book is 768 pages long and available in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into two dozen languages. There is also a 28-hour audiobook edition that is read by Obama himself.

<i>The Queen of Tuesday</i>

The Queen of Tuesday is a book by American author Darin Strauss, published in August 2020. It has been a critical and commercial success, with positive reviews in newspapers and radio and television broadcasts across the country. It was named a best book of the year in The Washington Post, The Millions, Literary Hub and others, and is currently a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.

References

  1. 1 2 "This American Life #359". July 18, 2008.
  2. Allison Gaudet Yarrow, "The Ever After: A Profile of Darin Strauss," Poets & Writers , September, 2010.
  3. McCrum, Robert (March 19, 2011). "To cut a long story short, brevity is best". The Guardian. London.
  4. Elizabeth Taylor, "Half a Life," Chicago Tribune, October 19, 2010.
  5. Dani Shapiro, "Atonement," The New York Times Book Review, September 10, 2010.
  6. "Tuesday Book Club". February 18, 2011.
  7. "Book Column, Believer Magazine". December 2010. Archived from the original on 2011-09-05.
  8. Julie Bosman, "‘Visit From Goon Squad’ Wins Critics Award," The New York Times, March 11, 2010. ("Darin Strauss was awarded the prize for autobiography for 'Half a Life,' McSweeney’s, which centers on a car accident the author was in that killed a classmate.")