The Life You Could Have is a trenchant, irreverent, and voice-driven collection of prose and poetry that opens in an emergency room, continues with a narrative of family mythology, and is followed with stories of trauma, economic class prejudice, gender oppression, near-death experience, critiques of journalism, the Supreme Court, protestors, and English majors, and an unconventional turn to faith in the face of the narrator’s flirtation with determinism. Closing essays explore questions of the actual accuracy of storytelling and propose a more transcendental acceptance of the incertitude of life. The arrangement is more artful than expository and often reads, “smart, subtle, dark, and yet funny,” as was said by award-winning novelist John Dalton of one of its pieces. Essays within have been called both, “searing,” by Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and “intentionally offensive,” by Fourth Genre, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and placed in a national essay competition, and more than a dozen pieces of poetry and prose have published in literary journals, including Reed Magazine and Storm Cellar.
Photo credit: John-Mark Kuznietsov
The Life You Could Have: a memoir 