Strange Piece of Paradise, by Terri Jentz

BUST
Aug/Sept 2006

One week into a 1977 cross-country bike trip, 20-year-old Terri Jentz and her friend from Yale were attacked while sleeping in an Oregon campground. An unknown assailant ran over their tent with his truck, then disembarked and began hacking at their bodies with an axe. Miraculously, both girls survived with minimal visible damages. Afterwards, Jentz’s friend was unable to remember anything about that night, but Jentz recalled every detail (except for the attacker’s face). She spent 15 years haunted by nightmares and struggled with a vague need for closure. “I wasn’t fully inhabiting my body,” she writes. “Maybe you could say that part of my soul fled into the desert that night…maybe you could say it abandoned my fragile, mortal body, and it hadn’t yet climbed back in.” Now a screenwriter living in California, she decided to return to the scene of the crime to try to track down her attacker, who has never been identified, and to find the missing pieces of herself.

The horror-movie story of the attack is gruesomely fascinating, but the sight of this 535-page memoir may cause some to worry that Jentz’s book—her first—will devolve into a diary of self-pity and inner turmoil. Fortunately, this is not at all the case. On the trail of her near-killer, Jentz interviews dozens of Oregonians about the crime in their backyard, and captures the recollections of these colorful characters with journalistic precision. In documenting her own emotional progress, she writes with poetic insight, yet is still able to put her story into a national context. The chronicle of Jentz’s unique experience is part detective story, part recovery journal, and part rallying cry for victim’s rights. It is also impossible to put down.