Truth or Consequences
Truth or Consequences
Improbable Adventures, a Near-Death Experience, and Unexpected Redemption in the New Mexico Desert
Daniel Asa Rose was a successful novelist, memoirist, book critic, and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and others, when the top blew off his domestic life. His wife of sixteen years wanted out. Before he could slip into depression, doubt, and self-loathing, Dan’s lifelong friend Tony made an irresistible proposition: go back to the place where, forty years earlier, their college road trip had come to a crashing halt, T-boned by a woman in the decidedly oddball little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Dan and Tony return to the scene of the crash in an effort to make sense of that fateful moment. He’s certain that if he can locate the woman in whose arms he almost died, he will find the self he lost and make peace with his life choices since. Dan moves into a single-wide trailer four blocks from the crash. Over the next eight months, inexplicable encounters make him fall in love with the New Mexico desert and the wiggy place that embraces him.
Truth or Consequences is a moving true story of hope and redemption. It is a funny, deeply felt rumination on aging, misadventure, and the serendipity of second chances.
“Truth or Consequences is the rollicking tale of Daniel Asa Rose’s return to the scene of a near-death experience. Forty years after he almost died in a car accident on a cross-country road trip, he returns to the small desert town where it happened and launches a madcap investigation into the wreck. Along the way, he finds much more than he bargained for: friends, enemies, maybe even himself. This is a thoroughly unique and entertaining memoir.”—Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun: A Memoir
“This memoir reveals that each point in one’s life may invigorate a new ‘coming of age’ in one’s ever-evolving consciousness—if indeed one possesses the self-discipline and strength of character to follow the truth no matter where it leads. Herein we find that chance is an enormous factor in determining one’s destiny, that chance spices the flavor of our lives.”—Jack Loeffler, author of Headed into the Wind: A Memoir
“He has the eye of a canny journalist and the soul of a frank sage. You have to read this book.”—Bonnie Friedman, author of Writing Past Dark and Surrendering Oz
“A shaggy-dog story of the best sort, funny, good-hearted, finely observed, and larded with life lessons. A pleasure throughout.”—Peter D. Kramer, author of Death of the Great Man and Listening to Prozac
“A haunting, surprising, smile-inducing, poignant memoir that paints an irresistible portrait of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.”—Walter Shapiro, author of Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Führer
“… an emotionally complex, stylishly executed and surprisingly moving memoir.”—Jessie Kornbluth, author of Married Sex
“The best books are the unclassifiable ones, and Truth or Consequences wriggles out of the reader’s grasp on almost every page. Are we reading a memoir, a travel narrative, a fantasy, a reckoning with time and mortality? The answer would be all of the above. What holds it together is Daniel Asa Rose’s comic verve, without which he never could have produced this indelible gallery of American eccentrics.”—James Marcus, former Executive Editor, Harper’s Magazine, and author of Amazonia and Glad to the Brink of Fear
Daniel Asa Rose won an O. Henry Prize and two PEN Fiction Awards for the stories in his first collection, Small Family with Rooster. His first novel, Flipping for It, a black comedy about divorce, was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Paperback. Daniel is also the author of Hiding Places, the story of how he took his young sons to Belgium to retrace their family’s escape from the Holocaust. His most recent book, Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant—and Save His Life, was named one of the Top Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Daniel lives in Connecticut.
Preface. Summer 1970: To Go
Part I. Winter 2010: Forty Years Later
Chapter 1. Awakening
Chapter 2. Number-One Dad
Chapter 3. Injury
Chapter 4. One-Armed Hug
Chapter 5. Capital C, Capital S
Chapter 6. Quaint It Ain’t
Chapter 7. The Story of America, Writ Small but Writ Spicy!
Chapter 8. Another Crack at Death
Part II. Two Minutes Later
Chapter 9. Shit Sneaks Up on You
Chapter 10. Door Number Two
Chapter 11. Swappin’ Lies
Chapter 12. It’s Called Being Twenty
Chapter 13. It’s All Here in Black and White
Chapter 14. Big Man Dying Small
Chapter 15. Enemy Territory
Chapter 16. Flukes and Hunches
Chapter 17. High Lonesome
Chapter 18. Her Beautiful Mouth
Part III. Two Months Later
Chapter 19. Having Fun Yet?
Chapter 20. Goes without Sayin’
Chapter 21. Jornada del Muerto
Chapter 22. Warts ’n’ All
Chapter 23. Perfectly Pleasant, Moderately Obese
Chapter 24. Razzmatazz for Real
Chapter 25. Enormous Space Is Near
Chapter 26. Scareful of Accidents
Chapter 27. The Big Beyond
Chapter 28. Goodbye, Everybody!
Epilogue. Two Years Later: Cattail Pollen
