I'd give this six stars if I could. It's a literary memoir and yet it's so much more and less than a memoir. It's perhaps the tightest, sparsest book I've ever read, reminding me of an artist Margery Allingham once invented who painted magnificent pictures and then took away just a little here, and covered in white just a little there, until there was just a perfect echo of a picture left. That's what Strauss has done; he's given us just enough of his life and himself to release the part of him altered beyond recognition by an accident "half a life" ago, in which he killed a girl from his high school.

I love it, I love how he gives us all the layers of his thoughts, from the thoughts he wanted others to think he was thinking to the thoughts he thought he should be thinking right down to the ugly thoughts beneath those, and then, sometimes, even down to the scrapings on real emotion that are left at the bottom. He's one of the writers I want to be when I grow up.