Things That Crash, Things That Fly

Author(s): Scott Gould

Location(s): Italian Alps, Greenville

Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs

Era(s): early 2000s

As a husband and wife plan an Italian vacation with friends—to visit her family’s Tuscan village—she makes a last-minute addition to the itinerary: she plans to leave him when they return. And her bombshell includes a caveat. He isn’t allowed to breathe a word of it to their traveling companions. So begins Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the groundbreaking memoir from award-winning writer Scott Gould.

After the awkward vacation with his soon-to-be estranged wife in Serra, Italy, Gould embarks on another, longer journey—through heartbreak and anger, despair and discovery. When he wangles a fellowship to research the death of William Guilfoil, a WWII pilot who crashed in the hills near Serra, Gould sets his sights on clarity and closure in his ex-wife’s ancestral home. As his story and Guilfoil’s intertwine, Gould gathers the fragments of a fractured heart. With a brutal honesty tempered with surprising humor, he tells us how he stitches them back together.

Things That Crash, Things That Fly is about lost love, daughters and fathers, Italian sandals, bad knees, acrobatic birds, oddly placed piercings…but most of all, Gould’s inventive memoir is about how it’s possible to rise and soar, even after you’ve struck the ground.

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