ABOUT
BIGGER THAN LIFE
Nelson Gross led an outsized life — one in which he played many roles: father, brother, husband, politician, entrepreneur. Killed by a couple of teenagers in a botched abduction and robbery, his murder shook his family in familiar and terrible ways. For his daughter, Dinah Lenney, herself the parent of young children, the loss sparked a self-reckoning that led to this book: both a meditation on grief and a coming of age story. By turns funny and sad, frustrating and fulfilling, her candid memoir conducts readers through marriage and divorce, blended and broken families—and, finally, the kinds of conflict that infect the best of us under the best of circumstances.
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Dinah Reads from "Bigger Than Life"
at the UCLA Extension Writer's Program
LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE, SHELF LIFE [VIEW THE REVIEW]
On September 17, 1997, Nelson Gross, a one-time Senate hopeful, was kidnapped by three teenage boys and brutally murdered; with the money they stole from him, they purchased jewelry, clothes, and hubcaps. BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nebraska, 227 pages, $25) is an account of the murder, written by Gross's daughter, Dinah Lenney, an actor who lives in Echo Park. Although the abduction made national news, the book is less about the tragedy than about what such events do to the survivors. The subject matter is grim but the writing is anything but, as Lenney, with an artful layering of details and remembered conversations, brings her complex, confounding father back to literary life.
— ROBERT ITO
EARLY PRAISE FOR BIGGER THAN LIFE
A driving vocal performance — tour de force momentum for pages at a stretch, and studded throughout with hard-earned human insight. While Lenney can be bracingly acerbic, the affection moving through this work is tidal.
— SVEN BIRKERTS