Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder - and Solve the Riddle of Myself (review)

On June 22, 1977, the summer after their freshman year at Yale, Terri Jentz and a roommate began riding the "BikeCentennial," a cross-country bicycle route. On the seventh day of the trip, they parted company with a couple they'd met along the way and ridden with for a time, set up camp in a day-use-only park, ate simple food heated on a tiny camp stove, crawled into mummy bags in their small tent, and fell asleep. That was the end of the first part of Jentz's life. She awoke to the sound of squealing tires. Suddenly a truck was on her shoulder and chest, and while she gasped for shallow breaths, she heard her roommate's screams and the dull thud of axe striking flesh. Then the truck moved, and this is what she saw: "the headless torso of a fit, meticulous young cowboy suspending an axe over my heart."

In the lengthy subtitle to her harrowing memoir, Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder—and Solve the Riddle of Myself, Jentz gives away the bare-bone plot of the book. She almost died out West, and the person who nearly murdered her sent her reeling into a haunted future, a riddle to herself. But Jentz understands that the facts don't make a story, and it is that knowledge, combined with her powerful writing, that makes this memoir so successful. The heart of the book is Jentz's threefold search: to make meaning out of the apparently random attack; to find herself; and to identify, long after the police have dropped the case, the man who almost killed her and derailed her life.

It took Jentz 15 years to realize that the crime had damaged not just her arm and shoulder, but also her psyche. Until that time, she used the facts of the story—and her scars—sometimes as a kind of wry anecdote, other times as a way of taking the measure of potential friends. During those years, Jentz felt haunted by a scarecrowlike self, a product of that night, a ghoulish underbelly of a self that scrawled notes about violent crimes and saved artifacts from that night. Sometimes she felt suddenly empty, inspiring a colleague to quip that the puppeteer had gone home. Images from the night crept into her waking life: the smell of blood ("copper pennies held in a damp palm"), the feel of her fingertips on her friend's exposed brain. Horrific nightmares ruined her sleep. Axes cropped up everywhere: the word on her own license plate; in the hands of the statue on the Oregon state capitol building's dome; license plates of cars cutting her off. The headless cowboy revisited too, in the memory of a childhood toy, a 3-D Viewmaster disk of just such a cowboy pointing a gun at the viewer. And for a while, she obsessively collected axes and hatchets from flea markets and hardware stores.

In 1992, driven in part by a desire to confront writer's block, but also to heal the mystery of herself, to find the part of her she believed remained in Oregon ("our blood soaked the earth that night, and surely it hadn't left"), and to solve the case, Jentz returned to the scene of the crime. There, she drove the route she'd biked, right into the park, and lay in the spot seared into memory, the precise location of the attack. It is the first time readers see the night through her eyes, not as a summary, not as a clipped story told to friends, not as a newspaper record, not as a police report. Of the attacker slicing her repeatedly with the axe, she writes: "A starburst explodes in my head. Then another. . . . I...