The Burn Journals - Brent Runyon - Med SC

The Burn Journals

By Brent Runyon 

To fourteen-year-old Brent Runyon, life has become a haze of small failures. He hates himself for liking the same girl his best friend likes. His recent suicide attempts–sliced wrists, handfuls of pills, hangings–have left him very much alive and feeling stupid. And now the threat of disciplinary action by the principal looms large, ever since Brent set a school locker on fire just for the hell of it. There seems to be no choice but to do something from which he can’t turn back, something that will amend for all the bad things he’s done, all the pain he’s caused everyone. After seventh period one day, he says good-bye to a few friends, takes the bus home, chats with his brother in their driveway, then steps into the shower, puts on a gasoline-doused bathrobe, and lights a match.

The Burn Journals chronicles Brent’s harrowing recovery, from the fragmented reality of his months spent in the burn unit of a Washington, D.C., children’s hospital, to the tedium of full-time physical and psychological rehabilitation, and finally to his unsettling return home, where his old life awaits him, both gratifyingly familiar and terrifyingly foreign. Written in the dispassionate style of a young teen barely able to grasp his own complex web of emotions, this memoir offers an explicit, honest, and painfully unsentimental portrait of remorse and hope. As Brent struggles to convey to his parents–and to himself–his reasons for wanting to die, he slowly pieces together a tenuous but viable blueprint for wanting to live again.

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