Honors Lecture of the Year 'Half my life ago, I killed a girl'

Darin Strauss's memoir "Half a life" opens with a devastating revelation: "Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

When Strauss was 18 and barely a month away from graduation, he was driving with some friends to play mini-golf when a cyclist, Celine Zilke, swerved into his path.

At 40 mph, in his father's car, this event comes to form what he calls a "shadowy giant" over the rest of his life.

"Name an experience. It's a good bet I've thought of Celine while experiencing it," Strauss wrote.

The accident was what many insurers call a "no fault fatality" and though exonerated in both a civil suit and by police, Strauss still grappled with a catalogue of emotions, and the thought of "how seriously will I be messed up by this?"

Strauss, 41, who spoke on Feb. 7 as part of the fourth annual Honors Lecture of the Year, hosted by the Honor's College, delivered these ruminations and his thoughts on how the moral honesty of good literature can help one see his or her self, and his confrontation of the "universal facts of hard grief and guilt."

While Strauss's lecture did not dwell directly on the events of his youth, the memoir is about his accident, its aftershocks and the perennial pangs of guilt and anxiety that have accompanied him throughout his life.

The chapters, in their brevity, aim for an absolute truth of the events surround the accident, while trying to confront Strauss's fear that in telling the story everything will sound "over-aestheticized and vague." Narrated in an impressionistic yet direct style, without sentimentality or narcissism, the book has garnered the author much critical acclaim.

Winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, "Half a Life" was also picked as an Entertainment Weekly "Must Read" and a New York Times Editor's pick.

Carrie Fischer said it was ultimately "a story of hope and what it means to be human."

"I was told I would have to live for two people," Strauss stated.

It is a statement that sums up his post-accident life, and the accompanying anxiety that ultimately led to his development of a severe stomach condition. But life, people and God can be very unfair, like the book of Job."

It is also with that same honesty that he confronts his past that offers no easy solutions. By living life day to day, and in believing that by focusing on his work he could live up the earlier sentiments of living for two people, he manages to survive.    

"If you live long enough, everyone will feel guilt. Even if you aren't culpable," Strauss added. "But in the end, all will be ok."