Truth or Consequences: Improbable Adventures, a Near-Death Experience, and Unexpected Redemption in the New Mexico Desert

by Daniel Asa Rose

Overview

Daniel Asa Rose was a successful novelist, memoirist, book critic, and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and others, when the top blew off his domestic life. His wife of sixteen years wanted out. Before he could slip into depression, doubt, and self-loathing, Dan's lifelong friend Tony made an irresistible proposition: go back to the place where, forty years earlier, their college road trip had come to a crashing halt, T-boned by a woman in the decidedly oddball little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Dan and Tony return to the scene of the crash in an effort to make sense of that fateful moment. He's certain that if he can locate the woman in whose arms he almost died, he will find the self he lost and make peace with his life choices since. Dan moves into a single-wide trailer four blocks from the crash. Over the next eight months, inexplicable encounters make him fall in love with the New Mexico desert and the wiggy place that embraces him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826364784
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	05/01/2023
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	1,051,758
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Daniel Asa Rose won an O. Henry Prize and two PEN Fiction Awards for the stories in his first collection, Small Family with Rooster. His first novel, Flipping for It, a black comedy about divorce, was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Paperback. Daniel is also the author of Hiding Places, the story of how he took his young sons to Belgium to retrace their family's escape from the Holocaust. His most recent book, Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant—and Save His Life, was named one of the Top Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Daniel lives in Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

"A shaggy-dog story of the best sort, funny, good-hearted, finely observed, and larded with life lessons. A pleasure throughout."—Peter D. Kramer, author of Death of the Great Man and Listening to Prozac

"Daniel Asa Rose is a great writer, and Truth or Consequences is a great tale. A funny, poignant, bizarrely uplifting adventure."—A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

"Truth or Consequences is the rollicking tale of Daniel Asa Rose's return to the scene of a near-death experience. Forty years after he almost died in a car accident on a cross-country road trip, he returns to the small desert town where it happened and launches a madcap investigation into the wreck. Along the way, he finds much more than he bargained for: friends, enemies, maybe even himself. This is a thoroughly unique and entertaining memoir."—Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun: A Memoir

"This memoir reveals that each point in one's life may invigorate a new 'coming of age' in one's ever-evolving consciousness—if indeed one possesses the self-discipline and strength of character to follow the truth no matter where it leads. Herein we find that chance is an enormous factor in determining one's destiny, that chance spices the flavor of our lives."—Jack Loeffler, author of Headed into the Wind: A Memoir

From the Publisher