What people are saying about Things That Crash, Things That Fly
“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.”