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    Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
    Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
    Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
    Ebook342 pages5 hours

    Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir

    By Danielle Trussoni

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year

    New York Times bestselling author Danielle Trussoni's unforgettable memoir of her wild and haunted father, a man whose war never really ended.

    From her charismatic father, Danielle Trussoni learned how to rock and roll, outrun the police, and never shy away from a fight. Spending hour upon hour trailing him around the bars and honky-tonks of La Crosse, Wisconsin, young Danielle grew up fascinated by stories of her dad's adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, where he'd risked his life crawling head first into narrow passageways to search for American POWs.

    A vivid and poignant portrait of a daughter's relationship with her father, this funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully written memoir, Falling Through the Earth, "makes plain that the horror of war doesn't end in the trenches" (Vanity Fair).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 20, 2007
    ISBN9781466818743
    Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
    Author

    Danielle Trussoni

    Danielle Trussoni is the New York Times, USA Today, and Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author of the supernatural thrillers Angelology and Angelopolis. She currently writers the Horror column for the New York Times Book Review and has recently served as a jurist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Trussoni holds an MFA in Fiction from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won the Michener-Copernicus Society of America award. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in the Hudson River Valley with her family and her pug Fly.

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    Reviews for Falling Through the Earth

    3.5/5

    73 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A very unique brutally honest memoir of what PTSD looked like for one family. The descriptions of the tunnels in Vietnam were fascinating.
    • 5/5
      A vivid and poignant portrait of a daughter's relationship with her father, this funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully written memoir "makes plain that the horror of war doesn't end in the trenches"As Danielle trails her father through nights at Roscoe's Vogue Bar, scores of wild girlfriends, and years of bad dreams, a vivid and poignant portrait of a father-daughter relationship unlike any other emerges. Although the Trussonis are fiercely committed to each other, theirs is a love story filled with anger, stubbornness, outrageous behavior, and battle scars that never completely heal. Beautifully told in a voice that is defiant, funny, and yet sometimes heartbreaking, Falling Through the Earth immediately joins the ranks of those classic memoirs whose characters imprint themselves indelibly into readers' lives.In this awkward weave of her father's tale with her self-absorbed growing-up memoir, Trussoni sacrifices emphasis and dilutes empathy. Danielle is endlessly forgiving of this case-hardened vet who is relentlessly mean, paranoid and petty. He is a prototype of the guy who came home and didn't know why he was a survivor. Trussoni has captured the essence of being in bloody battle one day and home the next, and then trying to make sense of it all.It helps one to understand somewhat more of our soldiers from Vietnam or any war for that matter that didn’t get the help they needed to cope with all they went thru in war.Her father just wasn’t able to cope and the sadness how it affected his daughter and whole family. Danielle is a strong, loving person who was dealt a bad hand. I shed many tears while reading this book. Heartwarming, heart wrenching, and eye-opening.Danielle finds herself sometimes the responsible adult, sometimes a stubborn teenager all over again. But in the end, what we discover is that this father and daughter is more than anything is the love and the toughness that makes them alike. I would happily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys memoirs. This writer has a great future and I will look forward to more of her books.
    • 3/5
      didn't finish it - just could not connect.
    • 4/5
      This was a somewhat dark, interesting read, partly because it was written by a local LaCrosse author, about her life growing up there in the 80's. My husband even read it in a day.
    • 5/5
      Excellent coming-of-age memoir centered around a father who survived Vietnam but whose family suffered the consequences of that war for years to come.
    • 4/5
      I had to read this book for a summer assignment, but I was told by my sister that I would thoroughly enjoy it. She was right. This book had such an emotional charge, that I found myself only able to take a few chapters at a time. The reality of Danielle Trussoni's life was so heartbreaking to me, that I often found myself about to cry. I couldn't image a childhood like hers. I reflected upon my own childhood and the privileges and love I have received. Danielle Trussoni is amazing to me. She is strong. While reading I found myself hating her father because of his relationship with her. I wanted him to love her, needed him to love her. I wanted her father to open up about his problems about Vietnam, and when he didn't, found myself feeling disappointed. The whole experience was a little strange actually because it was the first time I really connected with a character. Every feeling was organic. Every story was real. There were no lies, no sugar coated stories to make you feel like the relationship between Trussoni and her father was fixed. I really enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anybody.
    • 5/5
      Trussoni's ability to portray her life behind the scenes living with a victim of the Vietnam war is astounding. To "review" the book is too vague. The book is so deep with tone shifts, sensuous passages and true stories, that a simple sentence or too cannot equate the feelings after finishing the book. The extent of internal, emotional connections she creates with her reader is rare if not absent in most memoirs. What other book can leave one simotaneously feeling a sense of sympathy and ardent hatred? Falling Through the Earth is for someone who wants not only a deep and revealing work of literature, but desires a style of writing that is only exposed by one that has truly lived the experience.
    • 3/5
      Falling Through the Earth is an amazing memoir that portrays the horrors of Vietnam that continue to affect our American population today. The families of Vietnam veterans and war veterans all together would be able to relate to this story, because it shows the effects of war and how it damages the mental stability and emotions of great men and women. It inevitably leaves an irreparable scar which is passed down to their family and friends as Rita's father so honestly tells her. It provides a new look on the damage of war after all has been said and done. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the Vietnam war and its indirect effects on the families and friends of veterans.
    • 4/5
      Trussoni's memoir is a great story about an interesting relationship that I felt functioned better as just that than as a depiction of Vietnam. Its effects were seen throughout the book, but not always fully related and examined, and when they finally were at the end, it felt forced. I was fascinated with the little idisyncrasies of Trussoni's relationship with her father, all well depicted. What I felt was Trussoni's forte in this book was the language she used- eloquent yet conversational, emotional but very natural. At many points in the story, it seems to have the melodious feeling of poetry, which was a compelling way to describe some not-so-heartwarming scenes. A good read, but more for the way the story was told than the content itself.

    Book preview

    Falling Through the Earth - Danielle Trussoni

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