Non-fiction – paperback; Black Inc; 272 pages; 2021.
When he was 17 years old and in his final year at high school, Lech Blaine walked away from a horrific car crash that killed three of his best friends and left two in life-threatening comas.
Car Crash: A Memoir details the aftermath of the traumatic event — the small-town rumours, the media intrusion, the appropriation of grief by others — and explores Blaine’s own reaction to what happened. Why can’t he cry about it? Why did he survive? What really caused the accident on that fateful night?
Blaine, who is now a successful journalist and writer (Australian readers may recognise his name from a recent Quarterly Essay on the Opposition Leader — Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics — and a previous one about Australian politicians— Top Blokes:The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power), describes the book as “a work of creative non-fiction, not journalism, reportage or a personal diary” (page 253).
Is the distinction important? Probably not. It’s a memoir, and we all know that memoirs are subjective — the way you remember an event may be totally different to the way someone else who was there remembers it, for instance — but regardless, I devoured Car Crash in the space of a day because it has such a powerful narrative and is told in such a frank, forthright and honest way. In short, Blaine can write.
Head-on collision
But let’s spool back to the accident. It happened on a Saturday night in May 2009 in Toowoomba, 125km west of Brisbane, the Queensland capital. Seven people were travelling in the car (a 1989 gold Ford Fairlane), two of them inexplicably in the boot. Blaine was in the front passenger seat.
The vehicle drifted onto the left-hand shoulder of the New England Highway, the back tyre spinning on a patch of gravel. The inexperienced driver (who had not been drinking) simply over-corrected a correction and the car:
ploughed to the wrong side of the highway. By rights I should’ve been the bullseye, but the vehicle scraped a tree stump within the median strip, spinning on another ninety degrees. Screams howled from the back seat as we flew into a flood of high beams. I’m dead, I thought. Then it hit: another car, speed meeting speed, like two protons colliding. (page 3)
In the aftermath, Blaine, who escaped with nary a scratch on him, feels emotionally numb. He goes through the motions of saying, “I’m sorry for your loss”, but is “the survivor who couldn’t cry”.
There was no vocabulary for the strangeness of bereavement, especially when the departed were so young, the end so abrupt. We couldn’t use soothing euphemisms about a good innings or going to a better place. (page 39)
The UK edition is published by Greystone Books
He seeks solace in reading Facebook pages and returns to school pretty much straight away, where he finds himself dealing with the collective grief of others. (Interestingly, students at his school are offered counselling to deal with the loss of their friends, but Blaine, who is the one most in need of it, never takes up the offer.)
In between funerals and hospital visits, Blaine must also deal with intense scrutiny — by the police, the media and the public — in which rumour abounds.
The driver was speeding, clearly. At some point he’d been blindfolded from behind. The front passenger — me – had yanked on the steering wheel. We were committed to a suicide pact. Witnesses saw ziplock bags of weed on the back seat. […] Rumours bloomed into truth. White lies became facts. The simplest explanation — that generally law-abiding teenagers made a rash decision to overload a car, before their sober driver overshot a bend while under the speed limit — was the only version considered implausible. (page 98)
His grief plays out much later, when he goes to university, as shame, depression and suicide ideation. A drink driving charge acts as a wake-up call to seek help.
Survivor’s guilt
While Car Crash is essentially a memoir about survivor’s guilt and grief, it’s also a beautiful testimony to the importance of love in all its many forms — romantic love, parental love and platonic love between young men.
What shines through is the way Blaine honours his working-class parents — “a brave patriarch and an anxious matriarch” — newly separated when the accident occurs, who come together to help him even if they are ill-equipped emotionally to do so.
It’s only when his father, a tough-as-boots, taciturn, Labor-voting publican, opens up about his own traumatic experience that a closeness develops between them. (I love that Blaine is named after Polish solidarity leader Lech Walsea, who his father hero-worshipped, even though he’s forever explaining to people that Lech is a Polish name and the h is silent.)
This brave and heartbreaking book doesn’t shy away from hard truths. Both powerful and poignant, it highlights the fragility of life, the importance of connection and what it is to be bereaved when your life has barely started.
In 2021, Car Crash was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance, the Queensland Premier’s Non-Fiction Book Award, and the National Biography Award.
