Not by Accident [Reconstructing a Careless Life] (review)

Abstract

7v"or by Accident [Reconstructing a Careless Life] by Samantha Dunn Henry Holt, 2002, 245 pp., $23 The accident referred to in the title of Samantha Dunn's memoir is the horrific trampling of Dunn's leg by her beloved horse Harley while she was crossing a stream in a dusty MaIibu canyon. The injury was a Grade III, Class B barnyard open compound fracture of the tibia and fibula, and amputation, doctors warned, was the likely outcome. Chronicling her recovery in the gorgeous prose that helped make her novel Failing Paris a nominee for the PEN/West Fiction prize, Dunn takes an outward-looking approach to the age-old question, "Why me?" This is what distinguishes her story from the current spate of confessional memoirs. Like all good memoirists, Dunn knows that the key to self-discovery is distance and objectivity. Describing herself lying in the dirt awaiting the arrival of paramedics, she writes, "All at once it seems I am above myself, observing the way blood forms a kind of adobe as it flows into the earth, the opalescence of exposed bone, the leg slung out to the side of the woman's body, which I recognize as my own." She recalls asking, as she glimpsed her nearly severed leg, "How can this be reassembled? How can this be reassembled?" It is a question for Dunn, not the doctors, to answer. In the months after the accident, Dunn endured four painful surgeries aimed at avoiding amputation and eventually realized that her marriage, like her leg, might be beyond saving. Moreover, she came to suspect that the accident in the canyon was just the latest in a series of preventable mistakes, mishaps that had resulted in split lips, squashed fingers, a broken wrist, a cracked rib and a concussion , all before age eleven. Reflecting on the father she believes she chased away, the stepfather whose death she blames on herself, the husband whose drug addiction she ignored and the charismatic and willful mother and grandmother whose demons she internalized as her own, Dunn began to wonder whether she was merely accident-prone or whether something far more troubling could be wrong with her. A frequent contributor to magazines such as Shape, InStyle and Men's Fitness, Dunn knows how to research a story. Intent on discovering what it means to be accident-prone, Dunn started with Webster's and moved on to Freud and then to such dense medical publications as the Journal of Trauma, Clinical Orthopedics and Child The Missouri Review · 177 Psychology. She interviewed researchers , psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and sports psychologists. Accident-proneness, Dunn learned, is a symptom of something else: lefthandedness , a brain tumor, a penchant for risk or a desire for self-destruction . Right-handed and tumor-free, she at first concluded that she was a "rakish" risk-taker but eventually recognized and set out to redirect the self-destructive impulse behind her "accidental" behavior. A chance magazine assignment to interview a wellknown yogi started her on a path of spiritual recovery as remarkable as the healing ofher leg. Not byAccident is a thoughtful meditation on the consequences of choice in everyday life. With intelligence, compassion and wit, Dunn delivers a poignant memoir remarkably devoid of sentimentality. Don't be put off by the book's cover shot of Dunn bareback on Harley. You don't have to love horses to love this book. (PU) Ted Hughes: The Life ofa Poet by Elaine Feinstein Norton, 2001, 273 pp., $29.95 The tempestuous six-year union of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the Taylor and Burton of poets, polarized readers in the wake of Plath's suicide at age thirty in February 1963. Yet the weight of public opinion has always been on Plath's side. After all, evidence shows that the handsome Hughes left the vulnerable Plath and their two young children for a beautiful but equally troubled woman (Assia WevUl was also to commit suicide eventually, in a fashion eerily reminiscent of Plath). AU four of Plath's biographers cast Hughes as the villain, except for Anne Stevenson in her 1989 biography, Bitter Fame. Stevenson's reputation suffered when she portrayed Plath as insecure, difficult...