This Delicate Life
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 reckons with the difficulty of living in a world of random chance, where tragedy can happen without intention or reason.
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 after the unthinkable.
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Released January 19th, 2027
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This Delicate Life is one of those rare memoirs with real moral stakes on every page. Jacobson does not look away from the pain of living. Everything is connected, the good and the bad, the random and the ordered, and in this way the prose feels vibrantly alive. Self-implication and forgiveness live together in these pages, along with a deeply resonant chronicle of a childhood that tragically ended too soon. It is impossible to forget this story.
Garrard Conley — New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased
A debut of startling intelligence, beauty, and restraint, This Delicate Life is a memoir that both thinks and feels deeply. Ella Jacobson writes with a poet's precision and a philosopher's questioning, refusing the easy narrative of guilt and redemption to examine the aftermath of an accidental collision with a cyclist when she was sixteen. Her memoir is devastating and luminous, and, most importantly, alive with the search for a new language for tragedy and accident.
Meghan O'Rourke — New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom
This crisp, lyrical, unsentimental exploration of an accidental killing announces the arrival of an exciting new talent. Ella Jacobson combines a novelist's descriptive powers with a sharp critical eye.
Katie Roiphe — author of The Power Notebooks
This is an elegantly woven, mind-expanding account from a writer who has lived through something we collectively are so afraid of, we have invented no words to call its name. This memoir captures, so precisely and profoundly, what it feels like to live in a world that, despite everything, just continues “unalarmed, smooth as thread unspooling from the spindle.” The book puts its finger on what’s wrong in a beautiful, utterly unique, and unforgettable way.
Pam Houston — author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
I wrote this book, in part, because killing unintentionally is the single most common way to kill in the United States. The collective image of a killer remains someone who set out to do harm. But the story of chance and accident is far more ordinary than the narratives we regularly hear about intention, malice, and deliberation. Roughly 900,000 Americans are living with this fact.
If you are visiting this website because you, or someone you care about, has unintentionally injured or killed someone, please consider visiting the Hyacinth Fellowship. This group provides community and support for those who have unintentionally caused harm.