Jarred McGinnis’s guide to a commendable life

In There Is No Meant to Be, a profoundly moving and philosophical book that approximates to memoir but resists the limits of that genre, Jarred McGinnis focuses on emotional truth. In doing so, he introduces elements of fiction to amplify that truth, in a time-travelling text that projects into an imagined future. This hybrid form allows the author to interrogate the impact of the brutal, animating event in his life that, the day before his 21st birthday, stripped him of the ability to walk and rendered him paraplegic.

On 17 July 1997, the emergency brake on the truck McGinnis was driving failed and the vehicle skidded, rolled over and crashed. McGinnis recalls how he found himself trapped beneath the truck, “smelling earth and grease and my burning flesh”. His descriptions are candid, yet he admits that the remembrance of the tragic accident comes at a price: “To conjure the moment is to bring myself pain.” 

The clear-eyed and unsentimental conjuring of memories in There Is No Meant to Be is testament not just to the author’s skill but to his fortitude. McGinnis was raised in Florida and, throughout the book, his sensibility seems aligned with the dark humour of the southern gothic tradition exemplified by Flannery O’Connor. Armed with daring mischief and irony, and spurning any reader’s expectations of misery or voyeurism, he brings his tale to life, revisiting the trauma that also proved the catalyst for his debut novel, The Coward (2021).

A tour of his body with its plethora of scars – “saw-toothed atrophic marks where a transmission block seared into the meat of my arm and back” – may cause readers to wince, but it’s worth staying the course. If the author doesn’t flinch, neither should we. More shocking is the attitude of his first orthopaedic surgeon who, McGinnis notes sardonically, “hadn’t bothered to set my foot facing the correct direction because ‘I wouldn’t be using it anyway’”.

McGinnis’s book opens up into a story leavened by family lore: of murdered forebears and his taciturn father, who has lost much from his addiction to alcohol and from whom McGinnis keeps “a cordial distance”.  It’s hinted that the author’s mother, along with McGinnis himself, has inherited the “small magic” – the power of second sight – and had experienced a premonition of his accident. 

At times, McGinnis’s accounts are refracted through the recollections of others, such as the aunt who reminds him about the baby monitor that was used to keep track of him when he was eventually discharged from hospital. Whenever McGinnis forgot to turn off the monitor, his aunt “would be awakened to my heartbroken howls”. Though she resisted the urge to comfort him, she recognised that her nephew was grieving for what was “meant to be”. It would take him some time to settle on the notion that there was no “meant to be”.

McGinnis is front and centre of the book but Sarah, his wife, is its enigmatic, beating heart. She has a quiet but luminous presence, appearing early on as a sanguine 21-year-old with deep reserves of compassion. “She is the rock,” writes McGinnis, “and I am the thrashing sea.” They’d only been dating for a few months before his accident. Yet, remarkably, Sarah makes the decision to tear up the drafts of “Dear John” letters she had composed while McGinnis lay grievously injured in hospital to forge a life with him. For months after her decision, Sarah carries him, not figuratively but literally, on her back whenever needs must. Eventually, they bring up two daughters (Poe and younger sister Hedy Lu, but renamed and recast as twins Zed and Maude in the book) together.

McGinnis is always on amber alert for neuropathic pain – “crazy pain”, his kids call it – a chronic assault that arrives unbidden and unwelcome but expected. But he’s blessed with enamoured daughters, whose admiration is evident in their appreciation of an idiosyncratic father more likely to sing them the blues than nursery rhymes. Zed and Maude also have to navigate the inversions of parent/child responsibilities: to be ready, for example, to perform the necessary family drill at the end of car journeys, snapping together the parts of their father’s wheelchair with military precision.

If acts of filial devotion from his daughters are boundless, McGinnis tests Sarah’s commitment with a near-dalliance with a woman he meets in the quirky Irish pub he frequents, where the proprietor has a pet orangutan called Kevin. The flirtation comes to an end after a fight in the pub between a pit bull terrier and Kevin.

Questions of love and devotion run through the book, often sparked when McGinnis reflects on whether he has been a good father. “When the girls look back and see that the magic that I used to open the parking gate was a remote in my pocket,” he writes, “I hope that, though I may have disappointed them, I have never failed them.” It’s a sentiment that resonates with me, along with the pleasurable realisation that McGinnis’s virtuosic literary sleights of hand are not diminished by any doubts about the reliability of his rendering of family myths, or the question of whether Kevin really was a regular in the pub.

McGinnis is ever alert to the likelihood that the injuries he sustained in the accident will shave 20 years off his life. He mourns those future lost decades, which include missing his girls developing into adult women with children of their own. But perhaps he can change things after all. In the final part of the book, there’s an abrupt literary detour down a road as imaginative as it is surprising. McGinnis’s daring prose style, with its accounts of visions, deja vu and dreams, has been preparing the reader for this breach of form.

This innovative memoir is not a tale about coping with trauma or a guide for living with a disability, but an exploration of how to lead a commendable life. McGinnis can’t change his destiny but he asserts that, since his accident, he can intervene in his dreams and change their trajectory. He can’t alter the future but, in his dreams and in his writing, he can visit the future, conjure the fantasy of a better outcome, while reconciling himself to the acceptance that there is no meant to be.

There Is No Meant to Be: A Family Story by Jarred McGinnis is published by Harvill (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Colin Grant is the director of WritersMosaic, the magazine of the Royal Literary Fund

Photograph by Grégoire Bernardi / Guardian / eyevine