The Last Time I Died

Christian Franco is truly embracing the despair of divorce, doing nothing to slow the implosion of his career, friendships, and relationships. He camps out at bars and picks fights, finding that getting his ass kicked allows him his only meditative moments, something he explores with sardonic zeal.

Nine years of his childhood are entirely repressed, a consequence of his father killing his mother when Christian was eight. But a single clear memory resurfaces when Christian is beaten to death in a bar brawl: a memory of his stoop in Brooklyn, his father in the back of a cop car, and his mother being wheeled away on a gurney. He is resuscitated, and he craves more memories.

What follows is Christian's increasingly desperate means to kill himself and be revived, slowly piecing together snapshots from his childhood to understand how this rediscovered self-knowledge could make his wife come back. Alternating between heartbreaking memories of a happier time, Christian revels in the underbelly of New York City in a spectacular downward spiral.