FRIENDLY FIRE
FORTHCOMING SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

A month before college graduation, Paul was shot in the head by his best friend and roommate. In the book, this best friend and roommate is called Mark.

The bullet ripped through two walls before it struck Paul’s skull.

Mark, in the other room, had decided to tool around, or fool around, or do some cool pose in the mirror business, who knows, with a gun.

Not his only gun. Not his only mistake.

We journey with Paul from the shooting itself to its surgical counterpoint; through the dark spaces of survival and its accompanying traumatic brain injury; and into the paranoid, isolating, dehumanizing maw of personal injury cases.

The other story here is of a friendship, severed, vanquished. At some point in the course of Paul and Mark’s friendship, Mark acquired, legally, with required permits, five firearms, including one assault rifle, and those weapons lived with them in their college apartment. It was a non-issue. They were best friends. They were inseparable. They were 22-year old boys in a haze of youth and smarts and potential, thoroughly enamored with themselves, immune to hurt, and unconcerned with what happens when a gun is simply there, existing.

Working within short, fractured chapters, and keeping close to his natural voice, Paul speaks to the banality of gun violence and the indignity of its aftermath.

Excerpts from this memoir have been hand-selected by Roxane Gay to feature in her newsletter, The Audacity; others have been published in Catapult, Hippocampus, and JMWW.