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When a stranger shoots his dad on a Costa Rican pier, Peter Counter hauls his blood-drenched father to safety. Returning home, Counter discovers that his sense of time and memory is shattered, and in its place is a budding new mental illness: post-traumatic stress disorder.
Counter begins to see violence everywhere. From the music of Cat Stevens to Jeb Bush’s Twitter feed. Walter Benjamin to Johnny Carson. Taskmaster. Video games. ASMR videos on YouTube. The world is steeped in gore. Again and again, Counter finds himself reliving his father’s shooting as his trauma is fragmented, recast, and distorted on a compulsive mental Tilt-A-Whirl.
Formally inventive and incisively smart, How to Restore a Timeline revels in a fragile human condition battered by real conflict and hyper-curated media portrayals of death. Channelling Phoebe Bridgers, George Orwell, and Jordan Peele, these essays look us dead in the eye and ask: What kind of life can we piece together amid all the carnage?
"No one thinks, unpacks, illumines, and reckons with horror, both personal and pop-cultural, quite the way Peter Counter does. How to Restore a Timeline is a brilliant, humorous, heartbreaking examination of how certain events break our lives apart, and what we do with the pieces." — John Hodgman
"Beautifully written, genuinely moving, and totally inventive. Intelligent and unflinching. A haunting rumination on trauma, memory, survival, media, and violence. Essential reading." — Rachel Harrison, bestselling author of Cackle and Such Sharp Teeth
"In exploring his own personal traumas, Peter Counter’s incisive writing leaves behind an exit wound of its own. Every essay is a piece of pop culture shrapnel that fractures in the reader’s mind. You will heal, but you’ll carry the scars of this profound collection forever." — Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
"Suffused with warmth and humour yet unsparing in its honesty, Peter Counter’s genre-defying new work challenges us to explore the unturned pages and unshared stories in our own lives and consider how we could take power over them and change them for the better." — David Demchuk, author of The Bone Mother and RED X
"Peter Counter is our guide through the labyrinth, the string he provides anchoring each tailored diversion into pop culture. Hold tight to that thread as these essays converge, revealing a book built to house our collective hauntings, its alcoves overflowing with insight into the visceral demands of memory." — Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold and The Handyman Method
"Exhilarating. A work of intellectually rigorous cultural criticism that reads like a thriller. I was hooked from the very first page." — Melissa Maerz, author of Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused
"The way Peter Counter writes about trauma is an extraordinary thing. He explores violence and its consequences, the compulsive revisions and relivings and ripple effects, with a merciless, loving specificity. In a book so gore-soaked and anguished, Counter manages something rare: How to Restore a Timeline is as kind as it is brutal. This book’s hands are bloody, but they are holding yours." — Natalie Zina Walschots, author of Hench
"Counter is a gifted writer, with a keen eye and what seems to be a ravenous mind. The book is dizzying and thought-provoking, clearly thought and deeply felt." — Toronto Star
"A deeply vulnerable book, How to Restore a Timeline encourages readers to reflect on their own pain." — Literary Review of Canada
"An exquisitely exact mesh of author, expertise, and subject colours How to Restore a Timeline … Infused with the intersection between Counter’s life and interests, the essays produce new ways of looking, and new ripples in the timeline." — Canadian Notes and Queries
"How to Restore a Timeline is warm, sad, and contemplative. Language and detail are components that make it shine. The guts of this book are dark and painful, but it never wallows in victimhood … If you’re interested in dark and unusual stories with sharp and clear writing, that skillfully wield humour, heart, and pop-culture, and that thoughtfully dissect pain and mental illness, then this constellation of essays will probably be for you." — subTerrain
"Counter articulates how trauma not only radically alters the present but deforms the past and creates the future anew … Many pieces are treasures animated by a keen critical eye and welcome sense of humour … Counter does not offer nor encourage escape. Instead, he articulates ways of re-reading these moments of trauma, of understanding them in ways that offer, if not absence, then perhaps amelioration." — Winnipeg Free Press