Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

Content Warning: Guts includes detailed portrayals of survival situations, including human fear, danger, injury, and death. The book includes graphic descriptions of hunting, trapping, fishing, and killing wild animals, as well as processing the bodies for food and tools.

“So much of what I did as a boy came to be part of Brian—all of it, in some ways.”

Guts is Gary Paulsen’s effort to show how the major experiences in Brian’s wilderness survival in Hatchet (and subsequent novels) was inspired by real-world experiences. With this memoir, Paulsen ties Brian’s life and his own childhood into a tight bundle, such that neither exists without the other.

“There was, of course, hope—there is always hope. Even when I was called to car accidents and saw children I knew were dead, I would keep working on them because I could not bring myself to accept their death—the hope would not allow it—and I worked on this man now though the smell came up and the skin grew cold.”

Paulsen, a volunteer ambulance driver in rural America, is called to the scene of a heart attack victim. He arrived in roughly half an hour just in time to watch Hector, the victim, look directly into his eyes and die. It was this death, of the many he witnessed, that inspired the pilot in Hatchet, who also perishes of a heart attack. Unbeknownst to the author, he would die in a way strikingly similar to Hector, at home of cardiac arrest, acutely aware of what was happening to him because of his many exposures to heart-related incidents.

“I remembered him and his eyes and I put him in the plane next to Brian because he was, above all things, real, and I wanted the book to be real. But I did not sleep well that night when I wrote him into the book and I will not sleep well tonight thinking of his eyes.”

After telling the story of Hector, a man Paulsen attempted to save from cardiac arrest while working as a volunteer ambulance driver, Paulsen shows how the experience stayed with him and became fodder for his creative work years later. The raw honesty of Hatchet, coupled with the simple language and accessible plot make the novel a timeless bildungsroman.