After a tragic accident, a widow faces a lifetime of what-ifs

Last week, I had dinner with friends who’d lost everything in the recent LA fires. They spent their days filling out forms, being put on hold and assembling the ordinary stuff they and their kids need to live. By night, they did something different. They played events over and over in their heads, agonizing about what-ifs: What if there’d been less flammable stuff in their yard? What if they hadn’t forgotten to save certain important papers? What if they’d been warned to evacuate hours earlier, like the people on the other side of town?

Such stewing — with its mix of regret, self-recrimination and anger — is a profoundly human response to catastrophe. It achieves some sort of apotheosis in Brigitte Giraud’s haunting book Live Fast, which won France’s top literary prize in 2022. A work of “auto-fiction,” Live Fast looks back at the death of Giraud’s husband Claude in a motorcycle accident 20-odd years earlier, and ponders the many things that might have prevented this calamity. In the process, Giraud wanders the maze of life’s great conundrum: the dance between chance and destiny.

The basic facts are simple. On June 22, 1999, Claude, a 41-year-old music librarian, borrowed the ultra-powerful Honda CBR900 FireBlade that his brother-in-law had left in his and Brigitte’s garage while on vacation. Heading to pick up his son after school, Claude stopped at a red light. When it turned green, he hit the gas, and the monster engine caused it to pop an unexpected wheelie, flinging Claude into on-coming traffic.

Giraud explores this tragedy not with a straightforward narrative, but like someone taking apart one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions that uses crazy, convoluted ways to accomplish a simple task. Each chapter explains a step that — if only it hadn’t happened — might’ve stopped the accident. These steps include everything from her grandfather’s suicide, to her brother taking a sudden holiday, to the development of the Honda CBR900, which she calls “a bomb for kamikazes.” This motorcycle was invented in Japan but was considered so dangerous it couldn’t be sold there. But it could be exported to Europe. If only it hadn’t been.

Now, some of Giraud’s “if onlys” are farfetched, like thinking that things might’ve been different if Stephen King, one of Claude’s favorites, had been killed in his famous auto accident three days earlier. Others are self-punishing, like asking what if she hadn’t wanted to buy the house that contained the garage that stored her brother’s motorcycle that Claude would die on. “It’s always important to blame something or someone,” she writes wryly. “Even if that someone is you.”

Giraud gives all this what-iffing a lucidity that might feel forensic except for one big thing. It’s not cold-blooded. In Cory Stockwell’s fine translation, Live Fast takes what could seem like an intellectual exercise, a strange sort of catechism, and slowly, touchingly infuses it with emotion. We start feeling Giraud’s enduring love for her husband, a soulmate who becomes more real the more she writes. She knows him so well, adoring both the “elegant, refined, discreet, modest Claude,” and “his dark side, his B side” who enjoyed bombing along on a motorbike.

Of course, there’s a slightly nutty side to Giraud’s obsessive attempts to rewrite the past. Yet I think every single reader will understand her. It’s a desire we’ve all felt, a desire that’s inspired everything from Greek ideas of the Fates to cheesy episodes of Star Trek to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Giraud understands that we can’t roll back time and have a do-over. “There’s no such thing as “if only,” she writes. But thinking about such things offers a form of distraction, if not consolation. We gain a saving illusion of control over losses that feel less random when we can weave them into a kind of story that seems to explain them. Such weaving helps fight a crushing sense of meaninglessness, until we’re able to move on.

Which is how Giraud comes out the other side of her grief, and why Live Fast is not a downer. Clocking in at a snappy 159 pages, this is one of those rare books that works in two directions. It pulls you completely into its reality — believe me, it’s a page turner — but also sends you back out into the mystery of living. It gets you pondering your own losses and how you deal with all those what-ifs that rise up in every life.