Research Catalog

Disaster Falls : a family story / Stéphane Gerson.

Title: Disaster Falls : a family story / Stéphane Gerson.
Author: Gerson, Stéphane
Publication: New York : Crown, [2017]

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	CT275.G3643 A3 2017	Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

258 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"A piercing and luminescent catalogue of a father's grief, parsing the shapes and distances of profound loss into a way forward for a family in crisis"--
"A haunting chronicle of what endures when the world we know is swept away. On a day like any other, on a rafting trip down Utah's Green River, Stephane Gerson's eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That same night, as darkness fell, Stephane huddled in a tent with his wife, Alison, and their older son, Julian, trying to understand what seemed inconceivable. 'It's just the three of us now,' Alison said over the sounds of a light rain and, nearby, the rushing river. 'We cannot do it alone. We have to stick together.' Disaster Falls chronicles the aftermath of that day and their shared determination to stay true to Alison's resolution. At the heart of the book is Stephane's portrait of a marriage critically tested. Husband and wife grieve in radically different ways that threaten to isolate each of them in their post-Owen worlds. ('He feels so far,' Stephane says, when Alison shows him a selfie Owen had taken. 'He feels so close,' she says). With beautiful specificity, Stephane shows how they resist that isolation and reconfigure their marriage from within. As Stephane navigates his grief, the memoir expands to explore how society reacts to the death of a child. He depicts the 'good death' of his father, which enlarges Stephane's perspective on mortality. He excavates the history of the Green River--rife with hazards not mentioned in the rafting company's brochures. He explores how stories can both memorialize and obscure a person's life--and how they can rescue us. Disaster Falls is a powerful account of a life cleaved in two--raw, truthful, and unexpectedly consoling"--

Subject

Genre/Form

Autobiographies

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

ISBN

9781101906699
1101906693

LCCN

^^2016016306

OCLC

948734550

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library