Danielle Trussoni reads from Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir

Growing up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Danielle Trussoni was fascinated by stories of her dad’s adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Ultimately, she came to believe that when the man she adored drank too much, beat up strangers, or mistreated her mother, it was because the horror of those tunnels still lived inside him. Eventually her mom gave up and left, taking all the kids except Danielle. In Falling Through the Earth (Henry Holt and Co., 2006) the author trails her father through nights at Roscoe’s Vogue Bar, scores of wild girlfriends, and years of bad dreams with a voice that is defiant, funny, and heartbreaking. This vivid and poignant portrait of a father-daughter relationship is filled with anger, stubbornness, outrageous behavior, and battle scars that never completely heal.