On a family trip, Stéphane Gerson, AM’92, PhD’97, lost his young son Owen when their kayak capsized on Utah’s Green River. Gerson’s new book Disaster Falls: A Family Story (Crown, 2017) chronicles how he; his wife, Alison; and their older son, Julian, each in their own ways, navigated the devastating loss and the unfamiliar world it created. Gerson, a cultural historian, grieved in part by writing about Owen. This act of writing “felt like an affront ... inadequate, unjust, and intolerable. But it was less inadequate, less unjust, and less intolerable than silence.”
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