The Crash by Sally Wenley

In February 1987, a school bus crash in Hawke’s Bay killed five people and left 16-year-old Sally Wenley a paraplegic. Forty years on, she faces up to the crash and its aftermath. When we first meet Sally, she’s a “driven, fun-loving and at times naughty sports prefect” with big plans and a body built for sport. Then the crash happens, and everything changes. What makes this memoir stand out isn’t just the accident itself, but what comes after: the long stretch of anger, defiance, risk-taking, and the ways Sally tried to outrun pain and trauma. 

Sally is now an award-winning radio journalist and expertly brings her reporter’s instinct to her own story. One of the most important threads is what she learns about her brain injury, something she didn’t fully understand for decades. “Learning about the severity of my brain injury came as a shock,” she says. The discovery helped make sense of her exhaustion, emotional volatility and memory blanks; clarity that only came with hindsight.

She also explores the wider circle of impact, understanding that the crash didn’t just happen to her. As she begins looking outward toward school friends and teachers, she finds a community-shaped wound. “There was so much grief and confusion for many students and I believe it has not been dealt with to this day,” she says. 

What also lingers is how little people talked about it back then. There was silence and a lack of space for grief, a sign of the times, she says. From today’s perspective, it doesn’t make sense, and it clearly shows why trauma policies, counselling supports, and open conversation matter, not in theory but in lived experience.

Sally’s memoir, The Crash, is engaging and uplifting, but it’s also raw and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny in a way that only comes from surviving something life-altering and refusing to be flattened by it. Crucially, she doesn’t promise a tidy comeback story. What she offers is proof that dreams can be shattered, but new, successful careers are possible. 

If you’re looking for a memoir that’s candid without being self-pitying, funny without being flippant, and brave enough to examine what happened, not just on the day, but for decades after, this one is worth your time.

Reviewer: Andrea Molloy

Massey University Press