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One More Theory About Happiness book cover
One More Theory About Happiness
A Memoir
2010
First Published
3.63
Average Rating
208
Number of Pages

Paul Guest was a normal 12-year-old, fascinated with the old firecrackers his grandfather kept in a jar. He'd break them up and set fire to the rupture, creating showers of sparks. The day after he graduated from grade school, he borrowed a bicycle, lost control, and flipped it. Lying on the ground, unable to feel his body below his neck, what he thought was blood running from his nose was, in fact, spinal fluid. Guest would never again have the use of his arms or legs. Even so, he says he was lucky: "If I couldn't lift my arms I could breathe. I could feel... I no longer had to be, or even could be, who I once was. What I once was. I was broken. And new. One More Theory About Happiness is among the rarest of books: humbling, heartbreaking, and suffused with joy. Guest must learn to navigate the rest of his life in a wheelchair. An immobilizing halo is screwed into his skull. There are diapers and suctions; basic bodily functions are no longer private; the simplest daily tasks require help. Yet every agony is met with hope, each humiliation with dignity, moments of despair banished by an extraordinary capacity for gratitude. If you've never laughed and cried at the same time, Guest's book will change that. His language is pure poetry, and his simple, amazing grace redefines that world-weary word, "hero". "In these lyrical, searing pages, Guest manages to break our hearts and put them back together again." —Ann Hood, author of The Red Thread

Avg Rating
3.63
Number of Ratings
353
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
33%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Paul Guest
Paul Guest
Author · 5 books
Paul Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. In 2010 Ecco will publish his memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. The recipient of a 2007 Whiting Award, he is a visiting professor of English at the University of West Georgia.
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