Reading Paul Rousseau’s Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir (Harper Horizon, 2024), forced me to reckon with my own experience with guns and where they intersect with current American culture. The book—a young man’s first-hand account of how his best friend accidentally shot him with a legally acquired firearm inside his college apartment on April 7, 2017—is much more than a tragic example of gun negligence: it is a snapshot of a larger, nationwide kind of negligence implicating American masculinity and corporate irresponsibility.
My uncle was shot and killed by his friend in a hunting accident. The details, blurry within my collective family memory, didn’t register as real to me as a child. The war stories about my uncles and grandfathers fighting in World War II and Vietnam felt real in an academic and historical way. War existed in textbooks, but the personal pain felt by family members suffering the death of their loved one because he went hunting with a friend one day remained abstract. It wasn’t until I was older and started hunting with my father that I began to understand the implications of proximity to gunfire. But reading Rousseau’s book provided fresh insight and contextualizes how American gun culture infiltrates daily life beyond constant proximity or regular interactions with gun violence. Written seven years after the traumatic event, Rousseau’s book contains first-hand insight and articulates a clarity arrived at through compressing his personal suffering into a gem of self-reflection. “Writing is like a buffer against the physical aversion,” Rousseau writes. “It’s control in a situation where I had none.”
Structurally, the book is made up of a series of short episodic flashes, some of them numbered in a series as “Holes,” “Friendship,” and “Therapy.” Throughout the memoir, Rousseau is emotionally transparent while also using humor as a tool helping the reader navigate his inner trauma.
In “Holes,” Rousseau recounts the moments just prior to the shooting in his room and ends with his post-surgery self walking through a hospital wing, “trying to pinpoint where exactly I was in relation to everything else.” These chapters are interspersed with revelations revealing evolving pieces of Rousseau’s personality, lending additional dimension to his dreadful recovery ordeal. Sometimes Rousseau speaks as though he were out of his own traumatized body, adding a layer of surreality to his somatic experience:
“I tell my legs to get up and walk but they’ve forgotten how, and I stumble. I am missing steps, evaluating the depth of the floor all wrong. There are no bodily boundaries. The material world is in revolt, continuously shifting around me.”
These chapters are fraught as Rousseau takes us from the day of his injury to his subsequent craniotomy, and while he’s able to make light of it retrospectively—“Time has been acting fishy ever since I got shot”—there is the simultaneous candor of a young man forced to come to terms with a drastically different new normal.
Between these longer narrative sequences are shorter standalone chapters—fractures—where Rousseau relates memorable events, illuminating different aspects of his past and present. In “Hair,” he tells the story of his older sister and her husband going to a psychic. When his sister asks about her brother, the psychic eerily foresees that he would be “a writer who gets rich and writes about hair.” In “Video Game,” Rousseau relates to the playable character who is forced to shoot himself in the head before waking up in the same place, “slow to rise but alive.”
Rousseau draws comparisons like this—between himself and likenesses to himself he sees in his surroundings—to help articulate how the injury altered not just his self but his perception of himself in the world. Trauma shuffles life around. It jumbles and it takes. It breaks and distorts, but Rousseau eventually recovers enough to again make sense of his life.
Some of the most poignant chapters in the memoir concern Rousseau’s best friend, Mark, who accidentally shoots him and then, almost more traumatically, delays seeking help. In “Friendship,” we learn how they first meet in their dorm room. Rousseau recounts their initial bonding through music and how Mark “exorcised” his inhibitions through contact. It’s the kind of beginning to a friendship that felt so familiar to my own college experience; I see my friends in Mark, “the provocateur,” and it hurt to hear how this friendship concludes. “I wonder if he still plays,” writes Rousseau, in reference to how they used to play guitar together in their dorm. “I wonder if he thinks about me at all.”
In a chapter titled “Letter to Mark,” Rousseau continues wondering. He wonders what was going on in Mark’s head the night of the shooting: “A masculine thing? A power thing? A defiance thing?” There’s anger in this letter, but it’s also a sincere attempt to envision what their relationship might look like in the aftermath of the shooting and whether their friendship can ever possibly heal. Rousseau knows Mark is sorry, but the end of his letter arrives at why things can never return to how they were before the accident: “If every good memory I had of us was a lake, April 7 dumped into it a vat of toxic waste, tainting the whole body of water. Maybe a few things can be filtered out, but that lake is beyond redemption. Are you happy I didn’t die?”
Mark reminds me of my high school friends. The constant lack of self-awareness and preprogrammed masculinity concealing one’s true self is very familiar. I see myself in both Rousseau and Mark; I relate to being tolerant of the joking at my expense and I relate to being the one dishing it out. Within my adolescent friend group, violence was a constant throughline in our jokes. Rousseau calls Mark a “living, breathing comments section in need of constant stimulation,” and that’s the kind of organism my friend group became. While we all had in common difficult families, low self-esteem and the insidiousness of rural boredom, somehow our individual anger was an easier bond. Anger being the foundational bond of friendship is how Rousseau describes his social circle.
For Rousseau, there’s additional anger post-shooting. In the wake of so much physical and psychological destruction, he must also pursue a personal injury case which escalates into an increasingly complicated endeavor. Through a series of chapters titled “Litigation,” we see Rousseau trudging through the myriad layers of corporate muck. We see the dirty tricks of the lawyers hired to sabotage Rousseau’s case. We see his PTSD being written off as misdiagnosis. We see his family questioned in a manner intended to instigate they slip-up and appear to misrepresent facts. Rousseau acknowledges all this is common in such litigations:
“I’m not special. I am the standard. A legitimate victim with a reasonable, justifiable claim, whose case wasn’t ever going to be reviewed with impartiality and afforded due respect, but rather whose case was misshapen and distorted by a corporate entity, an insurance company, whose purpose is profit and minimizing loss. Blaming the victim is the bread and butter of their business.”
It takes almost four years for Rousseau to reach a settlement. He confesses his case leads him to almost take his own life—and that “admitting that comes with great relief.” Yet after years of feeling his humanity being shrunken to fit the size of a corporate asset, Rousseau emerges victorious, though permanently disabled, once again in charge of his life and future. Rousseau is additionally victorious as he retakes charge of his narrative; writing it down and ripping into the truth of what happened, renews his command over his own life story.
There is a culture of normalized violence common in young people, specifically in young men, and reading about Rousseau and his friends is seeing a singular portrait and its outcome. And yet, while this particular story is ultimately a lesson in resilience, it is also a sharp reminder of where this aspect of contemporary American life too often leads. Recently, a lone gunman murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The gunman, at-large at the writing of this review, inscribed the words “deny” “defend” and “depose”—insurance industry terms used to withhold funds from those seeking restitution as Rousseau had—on the bullet casings he used.
