This Delicate Life

A striking memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle and Half a Life, in which a young Alaskan woman must relearn how to live after accidentally killing a cyclist.

When she was sixteen, Ella Jacobson drove through an intersection as a cyclist ran his red light. He died shortly after impact, while she was on the phone with the 911 operator. In those few minutes, her understanding of the world, and what it would allow, fell apart. In exquisite yet unflinching prose, This Delicate Life explores the experience of growing up when every narrative about living in the world—about goodness, about blame, about the moral arc of the universe—is proven wrong. It reckons with the difficulty of living in a world of random chance, where tragedy can happen without intention or reason.

Raised in Alaska, Ella did not grow up expecting the world to be a bloodless place. Her community of Fairbanks, spread across a beautiful and dangerous valley, was marked by drownings and snowmobile accidents, bush plane crashes and hypothermia. From her family too, she learned about legacies of violence and loss. But exposure did not prepare her for the shocking realization that anyone, without intent, can find themselves in the position of taking a life.

There is no word in English for someone who has accidentally killed another person. In a culture that struggles with stories that don’t follow the redemptive arc of victim to survivor, or the easy justice of crime and punishment, This Delicate Life demonstrates the necessity of naming, of bearing grief, and of finding something like peace—in remote cabins and gardens, and through friendship—after the unthinkable.