Paul Guest was a normal 12-year-old, fascinated with the old firecrackers his grandfather kept in a jar. He'd break them up and set fire to the rupture, creating showers of sparks. Paul is a poet and this book is written in a straight-forward, no-nonsense manner. The memoirs's themes are tough and some of the book is painfully difficul This gripping memoir is an homage to resiliency, strength and courage. It is written by Paul Guest, now 27, who had a cataclysmic accident when he was 12 years old. While riding his teacher's old 10-speed bicycle, which had no brakes, he crashed and broke his neck.
In the tradition of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, One More Theory About Happiness is a bold and original memoir from the acclaimed, Whiting Award-winning poet Paul Guest, author of My Index of Horrifying Knowledge. As a child, I’d demanded my mother read book after book, over and over again. Neither of my parents had attended college, marrying soon after graduating from high school.
About book: Paul Guest brings a poet's perspective to his story of living with quadriplegia, the result of a bicycle accident when he was in middle school. And then it's okay, sort of. The on-the-cusp age at which he was injured seems key to the story.
Guest writes more directly than ever before about his paralysis. makes something beautiful out of it. And that is enough. tells his story in short scenes that break to white space before they might prompt pity. His memoir voice is gentle and matter-of-fact. His details are astounding and unforgettable. Dallas Morning News). Guest remembers; gently, carefully, painfully, each new milestone from the accident forward. This should have been a much longer and more detailed book. He would get going on an experience and describe it vividly and then skip ahead to the next experience without filling in the details. That said, he would take my breath away at times with his writing.
Paul Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. In 2010 Ecco will publish his memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. Paul Guest, Glenn Barkley, Stephen Naylor, Belinda Fox.
Even in its earliest pages, the memoir proves to be not for the faint of heart. Of his first moments after the accident Guest writes: My breath was labored.
This gripping memoir is an homage to resiliency, strength and courage. It is written by Paul Guest, now 27, who had a cataclysmic accident when he was 12-years-old. While riding his teacher’s old 10-speed bicycle, which had no brakes, he crashed and broke his neck. Since that day he has been confined to a wheelchair, a quadriplegic. The memoirs’s themes are tough and some of the book is painfully difficult to read. However, he is at no time maudlin and the poetics of his words cry out from the page.
Now, in his memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, Guest writes more directly than ever before about his paralysis. After a short prologue, the book begins with a recounting, harrowing in its matter-of-factness, of the accident that has shaped his life. Guest was 12 years old, attending a sixth-grade graduation party at a teacher’s house, when he and another boy set off on a pair of borrowed bicycles. 202 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. Continue reading the main story.
I had learned to read early, before beginning kindergarten. As a child, I'd demanded my mother read book after book, over and over again. My father managed a grocery store in a local chain, having worked in the business since his early teens, and my mother claimed to hate school, to see no sense in most of it, all the while pushing us to do our best. We began with words, then passages of text. They were easier for me than what I was reading at home. Books about the space shuttle, a history of the robot, mysteries, comic books - almost anything that I could find I opened up. Designed to measure a child's vocabulary, her book grew ever more dense each time she flipped a thick, time-stained page. After a while, Jody stopped, putting down the pen she had been making notes with.
Paul Guest was twelve years old, racing down a hill on a too big, ancient bicycle, when he discovered he had no brakes. Steering into anything that would slow down the bike, he hit a ditch, was thrown over the handlebars, and broke his neck. One More Theory About Happiness follows a boy into manhood, from the harrowing days immediately after his accident to his adult life as a teacher, award-winning poet, and soon-to-be husband. An unforgettable story-shatteringly funny, deeply moving, and breathtakingly honest - One More Theory About Happiness takes us from a body irrevocably changed to a life fiercely cherished. If no book jacket appears in a few seconds, then we don't have an excerpt of this book or your browser is unable to display it). Membership Advantages.
