Half a Life

Half a Life is Darin Strauss’s award-winning memoir about the tragic event that changed the trajectory of his life. Published in 2010 by McSweeney’s, the autobiographical story expands upon the This American Life podcast episode “Life After Death” where Strauss publicly discusses the emotional repercussions of being responsible for the accidental death of a young woman. Half a Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 2011 and was widely serialized for the painstaking clarity in which he relates his suburban nightmare.

Unlike other critically acclaimed memoirs, Strauss keeps his story short, in the style of a long essay, staying close to two hundred pages in length. He uses the space to be concise and honest.

The story begins on Long Island where Strauss grew up in the town of Roslyn Harbor. It is a month before Strauss’s graduation from high school. He is a carefree eighteen-year-old, driving his father’s Oldsmobile with high school friends to a mini-golf course. Suddenly, a girl swerves on her bike in front of the car. She is killed instantly. The police and witnesses deem that Strauss is not technically at fault. He is not driving under the influence of alcohol or marijuana, nor driving recklessly. Nevertheless, a sixteen-year-old girl, Celine Zilke—a fellow young student at his high school — is dead and he is alive.



The memoir follows the events immediately following the accident and describes the funeral. There he has an interaction with Celine’s mother that will haunt him for years to come. She tells him that she understands he isn’t at fault, but that now he has to work hard to live a good life for two people. She makes him promise to live “twice as well.” He sees the misery on her face, the strained way that she embraces him, and promises her he will. He doesn’t realize it at the time, but he will follow these instructions every day of his life going forward, always carrying Celine with him and living a double life.

Strauss chronicles his years after the accident when he attends Tufts University in Massachusetts. For him, college is a safe haven, a way to hide what feels like a flaw in his character. He rarely shares what happened to him with friends or lovers. It is his best-kept secret.

He spends time at the library researching physics and the velocity of his car at the moment of the accident, trying to make scientific sense of the incident. Other notable incidents in the story involve a psychosomatic stomach ailment caused by his guilt, along with painful therapy sessions.



As time passes, Strauss shows his struggle to find a true way to accept responsibility for Celine’s death. He thinks of Celine in every major event of his life and is always aware that she will never experience a similar moment or feeling to the one he is experiencing. Everything from enjoying the feeling of holding a cold can of soda to when his wife tells him she is pregnant, Celine is always present. All of his relationships are fraught with feelings about when to tell the person about the accident.

Even though Celine’s parents stated forgiveness and understanding in regards to Strauss’s actions, they still sue Strauss for millions of dollars in a case that drags on for years and then finally dwindles away. Critics of Half a Life have applauded Strauss for restraining from using the court case as a way of building suspense around the plot and overly dramatizing a tragic death for entertainment value.

Upon the release of Half a Life, Strauss has said in interviews that, in retrospect, Celine has fueled his successful fiction writing all along. In high school, he was a careless student, but he quickly became an overachiever in college.  He went on to be awarded the Guggenheim fellowship for fiction and is currently a professor at NYU. In many ways, Celine’s death gave birth to his life as a writer.



When Strauss began writing, he found ways that the enormity of his feelings could be tied together neatly through fiction. His novel Cheng & Eng, winner of the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek Book of the Year, is a story about two conjoined twins. When one of the twins dies, the other twin dies soon after, their lives being so intertwined.  Author Dani Shapiro wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it is difficult to not be reminded of the image of those conjoined twins when considering Half a Life, considering how much of Strauss’s life has been intertwined with death of Celine.

Strauss says that part of the inspiration for writing his memoir was to look at grief in a new light. The book explores the meaning of authentic grief, especially in an unusual situation such as the accidental killing of innocent life.