The Ways We Fracture

A review of Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir by Paul Rousseau

Roxane Gay has my ideal career.

She’s a New York Times Bestselling author. She publishes in many different genres. She’s able to find a home for her thoughts in nearly any publication around the world.

And she’s built enough resources around herself that she’s able to provide space for writers new to the scene.

Writers like Paul Rousseau. A Minnesota native, whose essay “Public Safety” launched Roxane’s “Emerging Writer Series” through her Substack, The Audacity, and led to the 2024 publication of his compelling memoir, “Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir.”

I can remember the instant feeling of needing to send work to Roxane when I learned of her project, in which every two weeks she’d publish an essay from a writer with 3 or less publications. There’s such an urgency in a young writer’s career—and I’m not sure that urgency ever dissipates—to find a writing community. I specifically wanted in that community, with my favorite writer, finding meaning through language that looks closely at life, befriending other writers who cared in the same way I did.

I quickly realized I had sadly (luckily?) already had more than those 3 credits. So I settled in as an ardent reader, discovering new writers to follow.

Paul’s essay, of which an expanded version appears in the memoir, endeared him to me as a writer instantly. The piece recounted the moment his college best friend, pseudonym Mark, accidentally shot him in the head, and the perplexing and infuriating aftermath. What began as an average night in college—two 20-something roommates sitting on the couch, deciding precisely how fucked up they’d get that night—becomes a tale of friendship marred in blood and bone fragments.

It’s within Paul’s precise details that the reader inhabits the disorientation that set over the scene. Mark, allegedly cleaning one of his five legally obtained firearms, pulls the trigger without realizing it was loaded. The bullet tears through two walls before connecting with Paul’s skull, as he’s bent over picking up a piece of garbage.

Then Paul walks down the hallway and takes a shower.

That image has lived in my mind in perpetuity since I first read this essay. The bullet leaving him “blindsided, tackled into a pool of cough syrup.” The stunned look in his eyes as he reached to the hole in his head. Stumbling over his own legs. The impossibility of understanding what to do next in such a situation that only a task as mundane as showering seemed to make sense.

The rest of the narrative unfolds into an experience of unwarranted cruelty that seems too fantastical to believe. Mark, fearing for his future, refuses to call emergency services for hours as Paul bleeds from his head. A painful recovery from neurosurgery and a traumatic brain injury that leaves him sensitive to light and sound, his emotions volatile while experiencing PTSD. The deeply isolating and dehumanizing experience of his personal injury case and contending with medical bills.

Paul’s ability to retell such an unbelievable story in such a grounded and visceral way captured my care with physicality. Emotional investment in memoir comes easy to me; this memoir was so grounded in the body that reading it felt like walking with my own two feet. His voice is not sentimental or overdone. Rather, it presented a story with balance and honesty, forgoing the dramatics of the heart that often cloud our vision as we search for the “why” of an event and its rippling aftermath.

That’s not to say this isn’t an emotional book. The bullet sent shards of skull into Paul’s prefrontal cortex. It has altered his ability to plan and control his emotions. He is rightfully angry: angry at Mark for his carelessness, that his life as he knew it was taken from him, that a soulless insurance company forced him to prove that the bullet that blasted through his skull was affecting his ability to live. His loved ones struggled to navigate how to support him in the aftermath of the trauma.

Throughout his entire experience, Paul is indulgent in his emotions—the anger, the paranoia, the deep sadness. But writing from years removed, he’s honest about that indulgence. He recognizes it not as a response to a grand conspiracy of the universe to hurt him, but rather the physical manifestation of a terrible choice by an immature man that was supposed to love him. I got the sense that he does not view his suffering as elevated. This is what happened to him; this is how it changed his life.

There’s a frankness to this memoir that keeps it within the reader’s touch, despite the incomprehensible situation. This is not a memoir about gun control. This is not a memoir about karma or how the universe repays us. It’s a memoir about the capability of our decisions to fracture and repair our relationships with other humans.

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