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.
Industry Reviews
"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
"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
"... an emotionally complex, stylishly executed and surprisingly moving memoir."--Jessie Kornbluth, author of Married Sex
"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 F?hrer
"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
"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
"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
