In ONE REASON TO LIVE (A Memoir About Surviving Trauma) readers meet Christine Rose just as she discovers that her husband of 15 years, Ethan, never completed his drive to the California AirBnb they own—he’s in a hospital 250 miles away. While Christine races to contact the hospital (Ethan’s not answering his cell), the narrative flashes back two years earlier to Ethan’s near-fatal fall from the roof of a construction job. Back to her present, Christine is shocked to discover Ethan was arrested for DUI and will stay the night in jail. Rose’s opening chapters are a painful yet beautiful entrance into Christine’s world of fear and anxiety borne out of trauma. With an anchor in her present as that tracks the aftermath of Ethan’s arrest, Rose deftly weaves in memories and scenes from her past to build the scaffold on which will hang the rest of the memoir.
Rose mentions suffering several sexual assaults—the fulcrum for the entire book—but doesn’t build a clear enough picture of the events to contextualize their effect during her travels. For example, she tentatively visits a yoga studio in the UK, but the class is a disaster and she leaves in tears. Rose then reveals quickly that she met one of her assailants through yoga back in the U.S. She needn’t share graphic details of the assaults, but had she taken the time early in the book to construct the context of the assault, her scene at the UK yoga studio could have landed like an anvil. The author is at her narrative best when she unfolds a scene that evokes a character beyond a verbal description. Delightful are the moments in which Christine packs her giant backpack for Europe, arrives at her first flat in England, and navigates her first few days traveling alone. Her neuroticism comes to life, and Rose successfully serves a travel cocktail of anxiety and tenacity.
Applying this level of craft to flesh out important threads (the open marriage, Ethan’s lies, the assaults) would have elevated the book from interesting to unforgettable. Rose’s writing can have laser-like beauty (“Even though neither my memory nor camera could properly capture it, my soul remembered” (pp. 237) but is plagued by pacing and editing issues in the latter half of the book. Part way through, the memoir turns into a chronological travel log, which diffuses its focus. As the story closes, it’s the idea of what the author has experienced, not the writing itself, that drives the reader to the end.
ONE REASON TO LIVE chronicles Christine Rose’s low-budget travel from country to country and celebrates the author’s courage in clawing her way back to emotional freedom–not just as a survivor but as a phoenix–after repeated trauma.
~Arly Crawford for IndieReader