We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher review – the pain of grief and joy of living

Beecher’s beautiful memoir, written partly in response to the death of her brother aged 25, describes in startling detail the highs and lows of existence

The title of Anna Beecher’s first work of nonfiction can be read in various ways – an expression of triumph, relief or anticlimax. She uses it as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof.

In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths, and she and her friend return home carrying the weight of that knowledge. “Our lives are punctured by moments of impossibility when the future unlatches from the present and a gap opens, which we must find a way to step over,” she writes. Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents. “Looking back at this chain of non-disasters, from which all parties emerged bruised but alive, I now see loss,” she says. But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: “Little losses, against the vast loss of John.”

We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher is published by W&N (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply