Will & I

May 16, 2016
In this memoir of suffering and recovery, Narrative editor Byars recounts his struggle to master a body shattered by tragedy. As a college sophomore, Byars was severely injured in a car accident. Botched surgery led to a massive brain-stem stroke, leaving Byars quadriplegic. Resisting the diagnosis, he gradually recovered the use of his limbs, though he continued to suffer physical deficits. For Byars, reconstructing himself as a social being was equally difficult, especially in comparison to his uninjured identical twin, Will. Writing became central to Byars's creation of a new identity, even as Will married and started a family. Byars describes his losses and slow progress in succinct, unsentimental prose. The most striking feature of the memoir is his emotional distance. Even Will, his genetic double, plays only an occasional role in Byars's narrative. In an intriguing stylistic choice, Byars blends past-tense narration of his accident and aftermath with present-tense descriptions of life on an isolated rural property. Byars's minimalist approach and his remove make for a fascinating, if chilling, meditation on the aftermath of trauma. The themes that appear in the final chapter would have benefited from earlier development, but they provide a remarkable conclusion to his long calvary.

May 1, 2016
A tragic accident gives birth to a writer.Before the car crash that almost killed him, Narrative Magazine assistant editor Byars was a college student from a Southern family that included his identical twin brother, Will. This memoir of recovery against considerable odds traces the relationship between the brothers, their innate closeness, and what changed after the accident and what didn't, but Will doesn't figure nearly as prominently throughout as the title would seem to suggest. In much of the first half, the author seems to be trying to figure out just what is his story and how best to tell it. The crash in which he was a passenger threatened to kill him and initially seemed likely to paralyze him, and then he suffered post-surgical complications so severe that the doctors predicted he wouldn't survive for more than one week. Byars beat the odds in terms of both survival and physical mobility, but he still faced a long road to what would never be all the way back. He had to relearn how to talk and to figure out how to get around on his own. And he was on his own a lot, partly by choice ("I only knew what I didn't want to do: anything to do with stagnation. My parents seemed content with my doing nothing") but also partly because others his age, particularly potential romantic partners, didn't quite know how to deal with someone whose body had suffered so much. "My brain felt like the least damaged part of my body," he writes. "It was painfully undamaged." Despite occasional wishes that he had somehow forgotten who he had been or the extent of his predicament, his memoir is remarkably free of sentimentality or self-pity. He found both an outlet and a vocation in his writing, and he had to come to terms with the loss of those who had been prepared to lose him. A stark, honest book that reads like a writer's apprenticeship amid harrowing circumstances.

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May 1, 2016
An elegant, spare, and at times wry memoir by a young man who loses his body then struggles to reclaim it. Clay Byars is a college sophomore when a car accident leaves him seriously injured. But it's a botched surgery nine months laterto repair nerves in his right shoulderthat causes a massive brain-stem stroke, almost killing him but instead leaving him paralyzed from the eyes down. Wisely, Byars recounts his recovery in nonlinear fashion, moving among his present-day life on an Alabama farm (including neighbor Bubba, quick to greet intruders with a loaded rifle); an unhappy romance; the slow return of sensation and movement; and singing lessons (to strengthen the vocal chords) with the gifted Dewin. The flaw in this book is Will, Byars' identical twin, whodespite receiving top billing in the titleremains on the edge of the narrative. One thing is clear: Byars can write, and readers of this slim narrativeit can almost be read in one sittingare sure to follow Byars wherever he may lead us next.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)