LIVE FAST

A gripping novel about grief and loss.

In her autobiographical novel, Giraud chronicles the mundane events leading up to her husband Claude’s accidental death 20 years ago. One afternoon, as he’s running a series of errands, he crashes a borrowed Honda CBR900 Fireblade motorcycle. Though it’s a tragedy of chance and circumstance, Giraud tortures herself, wondering if there’s something she did to contribute to this fateful accident. In elegant but straightforward prose, Giraud’s narrator asks a series of unanswerable questions: Why did he ride that particular motorcycle? Why did he need to make a detour? What could she have done so that he might still be alive? “I’m writing from this remote setting where I’ve landed,” Giraud begins, “and from which I perceive the world as a slightly blurry film that for a long time has been shot without me.” Though the narrator pores over each and every action her husband took, as if examining a film strip, existing in the past offers no answers. Rather, all the what ifs have “made [her] live [her] life in the past conditional.” “It’s like trying to wring out a dry cloth,” she writes with bemusement. “And yet.” Though we get tidbits of their marriage and work, Giraud is more interested in parsing the day of Claude’s death, not in scenes they shared while he was still alive. Ultimately, Giraud understands that “there’s no chronological or methodological order to any series of events” even as she tries to make sense of this random tragedy. Written with forensic precision and journalistic detail, Giraud’s elegiac novel is about the questions that haunt us no matter how much we may try to rid ourselves of them.

An exhaustive inquiry into an irrevocable loss.