This Book Will Change Your Life - Half A Life by Darin Strauss.

Read. Travel. Rinse. Repeat. You know the drill. Our drill anyway. And so it is that we have read Half A Life by Darin Strauss, not so much a rumination on death, as much a rumination on living with death, a death you directly played a role in, if not outright caused. Which is different, much different than musing about the death of someone that you had nothing to do with, the death, not the person, and can't escape. And yes, we are projecting here, thinking about My Father's House and the recent interview we did in Rain Taxi. In that interview we talked about listening to Strauss talk about Half A Life. Strauss commented on how it had to be a memoir, and listening to him made us think about how the foundational material in My Father's House had ultimately felt like it had to be fiction, that we needed more latitude than real life seemed to allow us. Mind you that was before we read the book, and mind you, it's not that we're sure we feel any different now, but we are struck that as intimate and and tortured as one might be regarding the experience of losing someone you love, it seems impossible that it can ever be as intimate or tortured as a death you play a role in. We're also struck that we have absolutely no sense how torturous this must be, and even a book as well-crafted, and moving, as this one feels like it must barely capture what the second half of Strauss' life must have truly been like. Finally, any number of people have commented on how brave Strauss was to write all of this down, and it is brave of course, but it is also what writer's do, especially great writers like Strauss. They write, everything they know, everything they experience, they have to, they have no choice. Given this, we would like to offer a different take on the narrative surrounding Half A Life. And that take is this, what makes Strauss brave, is that even as he has struggled with and against this tragedy, he has somehow been able to live not just a writing life, but any life at all.

Wherein we talk My Father's House with the terrific Paula Bomer at Rain Taxi.

For real. All of it. We are My Father's House interview and we are so very appreciative that Paula, who is indeed most terrific, suggested we talk, and that Rain Taxi saw said discussion as fit to print. Now for some excerpt.

PB: Both the narrator and his father have tough guy personas and yet both are artists, and in the case of the narrator, a caregiver. There’s a lot of ambivalence about masculinity and what it means, how confining it can be but also how necessary. Eventually, your narrator is allowed all sorts of release—crying, really letting go of his father, and figuring out what he needs to do next. Perhaps it was the slow painful aspect of a death by cancer; not to diminish the loss, but I’ve heard people say about certain deaths, “it was his time.”

BT: It’s funny because one reviewer wrote how there were certain ways the character managed his emotions in the book that bothered him as an editor, but then he realized that maybe his own need to be tough was affecting his ability to embrace the emotions being expressed, and that made me smile. He was the first person to touch on this thread, and now you are the second. It was a conscious thing I wanted to play with, but if I’m the only one who sees it in the text, I’m not sure it qualifies as being part of the book at all. The character does need to find a way to be sad though, and experience grief, and to embrace that tough guy persona—or not—regardless of confusing signals about masculinity and what it means to be a father or son. I don’t know that the character gets there in a healthy way, but he does get there because he’s ultimately so overwhelmed by all of it he has no choice. It’s an implosion of grief, though in this character’s case it is also the start of something, because I wanted to connect all of this to being an artist as well. When my father died, my mom and I talked about whether he might have been more successful and better able to bring more layers to his work if he could have better embraced his feelings and been less caught up in being tough and not exploring things. I wanted the character to come to understand this in the latter stages of the book as he realized that he wants to create art as well. In terms of the idea that “it was his time,” we always have to separate out people’s suffering from their actual lives. If someone is suffering, then yes, it can feel like someone’s time because you can’t bear to watch them suffer, but that has nothing to do with what they may have still done with their lives if they were healthy and how you may have yet interacted with them. From that perspective, it’s never anyone’s time.