Douglas Bell’s Run Over is the latest addition to the growing library of trauma memoirs – stories of life-changing encounters with illness, freak storms, rogue animals, or murderous vehicles. Such memoirs, by positing trauma as a transforming experience, are dependent on a clearly defined before-and-after story arc: before the trauma I was like this, after I was like that. Authors may dream up many narrative tricks of perspective and time to get this point across, but without a sense of change, of a life journey suddenly detoured, trauma memoirs fall flat.

This is where Run Over fails. Bell was run over by a truck at the age of 14, a near-death accident that hospitalized him for months and left him with debilitating physical and emotional problems, including an overdependence on his mother who helped nurse him back to health. Readers know this because Bell tells them, again and again. That necessary arc, the sign-posts on the life-changing journey, are too often merely acknowledged, as if Bell were simply a guide leading readers on a tour through his life. For instance, Bell states that he developed a sharp wit in the long months stranded in a hospital bed, but almost never demonstrates this humour. He also says he became overly attached to his mother after the accident, but again, this dependence is more insisted upon than evoked.

This isn’t to say that Run Over is without merit. When Bell bears down to focus his attention and emotions on one topic he can be a powerful and insightful writer. A comic portrayal of his father’s breakfast ritual shows flashes of urbane wit, while a beautifully understated description of his mother’s final moments in a dreary hospital room demonstrate how good this book could have been had its disparate parts been synthesized into an organic whole. As it stands, Run Over reads like a an excellent magazine feature stretched into a full-length book.