Dying is the secret wish of the survivor. I don’t just mean by suicide, although that had become the most attractive exit strategy. I’m talking about the need for danger. The impulse to shipwreck the miracle of being alive.
I was more familiar with Lech Blaine’s political writing, and I had actually completely forgotten that I’d given my son Car Crash when it came out in 2021 until he loaned it to me last month.
Oh. My. God. This is the kind of book that gives a mother of a teenage son the chills.
Boys, booze and cars. Or just cars, no booze required, and a pack of teenage males. My worst nightmare. My secret fear. As a mother, you need to let your son go but you also dread that knock at the door in the night. You can’t talk/nag/force a sense of self-preservation into them; they are going to take risks anyway, because that’s just what they do. Car Crash is a devastating read.
One night in 2009 in the Queensland town of Toowoomba, seven teenage boys hop in a car together and by the next morning, three of them are dead and two are in intensive care. Lech Blaine, seventeen at the time, walked away from the crash physically unharmed but damaged in so many ways by the tragedy. His attempts to cope with his grief and guilt are heartbreaking; he performs stoicism and ‘doing so well’ for social media and his school community while dying inside. The section on Blaine’s schoolies week had me crying.
Blaine’s beautifully written, tragic (and occasionally very funny) memoir lives and breathes the world of boys who are finding their way into being men but have the usual concerns of school, sport, friendships, love and sex displaced and derailed by grief and guilt. And despite the sensational nature of the accident, the rumors, the speculations around drugs, speed and booze, it isn’t some harsh expose of Australian ‘toxic masculinity’. It is – as a couple of reviewers pointed out – essentially a tender story. There’s damage and also healing; Car Crash is heartbreaking as well as ultimately hopeful as it struggles towards greater understanding.
I didn’t know about this book — like you, I know Lech Blaine mostly through his political writing and his latest memoir. This sounds harrowing but I think I will check it out.