BOOK REVIEWS
Courtesy of Beaverdale Books
Review by Alice Meyer
‘One More Theory About Happiness’
By Paul Guest
Ecco
5/1/2010
$21.99
208 pp
At the age of 12, Paul Guest was injured in a bicycle accident while celebrating at a teacher’s home with other gifted students at the end of the school year. Misguided efforts at first aid resulted in surgeries and physical therapy that did nothing to save him from quadriplegia.
Now 27, Guest is an accomplished poet. But in this work of prose, he offers up his story of his past, present and future with a candidness that does not ask for sympathy or admiration. He simply lays it out — the dashed hopes of getting better, the intimacy of having aides tend to every need, the hurriedness of bus drivers pulling up to the stop only to tell him the chairlift is broken (which happens more than you might imagine). He tells us “disability isn’t about the loss of control as it is about the transferal of it.”
Guest goes off to college, then graduate school and on to becoming a published poet and college instructor. And while each stage of his life comes with its own set of challenges, he addresses them with startling insight.
His emergence as a poet and writer is a story in itself — the first poem he writes doesn’t mean what he thinks it means, but he is able to draw something out of it. He can’t just jot down a thought or an idea as it comes to him; something most of us take for granted. The memoir doesn’t contain any poems, but I’ll be seeking out “My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge” to read more. CV
