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In 2011, my family was in a major car accident. We were hit head-on by a man in the throes of a heart attack. It took three years to recover from our injuries, and a couple more to deal with the aftereffects of trauma. When I finally returned to the world — as father and husband, friend and brother, writer and citizen — it became clear that our society was in its own traumatized state — reeling from the string of police shootings of unarmed African Americans, stunned by yet one more mass shooting. The people around me were displaying all the signs of PTSD — jumpiness, irritability, numbness — and, concordantly, my interactions out in daily life were becoming more dysfunctional, at times downright hostile. Us against them. Red vs. blue. Black vs. white. Rich vs. poor. That we were living in a progressive town inside a conservative county in the Mountain South only made things more volatile. I decided that if we were all living in a fractured society no longer recognizable, then it was up to me to re-engage in it. I would enter into encounters with people as conscious as possible of the potential divides and misunderstandings between us. I started with my neighborhood and town, then moved out into the counties around us, then traveled further out into the country. My goal: to connect.
"The short essays in Sebastian Matthews's new book Beyond Repair: Encounters in a Fractured World document with extraordinary candor his encounters, for good and ill, with people from all walks of life in the wake of a terrible car accident that nearly cost him his life. 'Recovery is less about return, or repair,' he writes, 'than it is about re-creation.' And what he re-creates, step by painful step, is the story of a man who is capable of bearing witness not only to the vagaries of his own fractured experience, but to the best and worst of what he finds in this fractured world. This is a book to learn from and live by—a praise song to the imagination and its healing ways." —Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood
"Beyond Repair: Encounters in a Fractured State is a portrait of community in traumatized times. Sebastian Matthews documents dislocation, both psychic and physical, in these tightly crafted nonfiction vignettes. Whether the speaker is on the sidelines at his child's soccer game, seeking help from the credit card fraud hotline, or in the elevator with a confused Alzheimer's sufferer, Matthews enacts the difficulty and necessity of compassion. With wryly insightful observations, Beyond Repair brings us closer with every sentence to the deep repairing we need." —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling
"A deftly crafted, presented in the format of a series of essays, impressively detailed, and inherently engaging memoir, "Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State" is a life story for our times and unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Contemporary American Biography collections. "—Midwest Book Review
"Beautifully written and timely, Beyond Repair weaves together personal and national traumas in a way that resonated particularly with me as a writer in North Carolina wrestling with race in the Trump era.”—David Graham, The Atlantic