Overview

As a husband and wife make plans for an Italian vacation with friends-to visit her family's Tuscan village-she makes an unexpected, last-minute addition to the itinerary: she plans to leave him upon their return to the States. And her bombshell includes a strange caveat. He isn't allowed to breathe a word of it to their traveling companions. So begins Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the groundbreaking new memoir from award-winning writer Scott Gould. Gould navigates that awkward vacation with his soon-to-be estranged wife in Serra, Italy, then sets out on another, longer journey-a winding route through heartbreak and anger, confusion and futility, despair and discovery. When Gould wangles (under dubious circumstances) a fellowship to research the death of William Guilfoil, a young WWII fighter pilot who crashed and died in the hills near Serra, he instead sets his sights on clarity and closure in his ex-wife's ancestral home. As he grinds through an uncharted future, his story and Guilfoil's become intertwined, and Gould gathers the fragments of a fractured heart. With a brutal honesty tempered with surprising humor, he tells us how he begins to stitch them back together. Things That Crash, Things That Fly is about many things: lost love, daughters and fathers, evaporating marriage, Italian sandals, friendship, bad knees, acrobatic birds, secrecy, oddly placed piercings...but most of all, Gould's inventive memoir is about how it's truly possible to rise and soar, even after you've struck the ground.

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9781925965469

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Reviews

Picasso said, 'Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction.' Edmund Wilson called this the wound and the bow. Another way to say this is there are no thrills without catastrophes. Alas. As Scott Gould's brilliantly titled memoir indicates, this is the very territory of this book: the relationship between the blast-radius and transcendence. In a curious sense, they are synonymous. No crashes; no flights. With truly impressive distance and irony, Gould takes his own set of tragic circumstances and turns them into nothing less than an allegory of the cost of being fully human and vulnerable. An extraordinary work. David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead In his masterful memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly, Scott Gould navigates seamlessly between dark-comic wit and bare-knuckled heartbreak, guiding the reader through a crisis of spirit that is at once singular and universal. Gould's talents as a celebrated fiction writer animate these pages, each brief chapter perfectly calibrated to propel the story forward. Every character, even the most minor, bristles with life, like the beautiful Italian bank teller who wore a white denim skirt with courageous seams that barely held their own. As the title suggests, even things that crash-a WWII plane in the Italian countryside, a marriage of nearly two decades, unrealized dreams-can be resurrected in new forms. And if the past is haunted by ghosts, the future is alive with the possibility of angels, for, as the narrator comes to understand, through love I had become something better, something bigger, and I'm positive that is the finest thing love can do. Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays I love everything about this book, but two things most: the going-for-broke honesty and the great good humor with which this tale of heartbreak is told. Scott Gould is a born storyteller, and gives here the story he was born to give: his own loss that begins in a South Carolina kitchen, then the dark vacation of the soul he must make it through thereafter, then his own walkabout among the good people of Italy and the awful history of war in order to find his own heart returned to him, not unscathed but stronger for all it's been through. Read this book. You'll be a better person for it. And you'll have a good time too. Bret Lott, author of Jewel Interwoven with the story of the young WWII pilot who falls from the sky into a small Tuscan village, Scott Gould's captivating memoir straddles two worlds as he plots a course through his own fall and does so with such hard-won and gorgeous truth-telling, you'll cheer him as he lands. Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread

Author Information

Scott Gould is the author of the story collection, Strangers to Temptation (Hub City Press), and the novels, Whereabouts (Koehler Books) and The Hammerhead Chronicles (University of North Georgia Press). His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Carolina Quarterly, New Stories from the South and others. He is a multiple winner of the Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose from the South Carolina Arts Commission, as well as the Fiction Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina. More information is available at scottgouldwriter.com.

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