"It was very early in the morning, about 6.45am, and I was driving my little sister Heidi to school. We were in my mother’s dark blue 1968 Oldsmobile Delta 88. It was a great, enormous, giant slab of a car: the family called it the Corillian cruiser after the big battleships in Star Wars.

I was driving down a two-lane country highway and had to make a left turn into the school parking lot. But as we were waiting to turn, a classmate of mine named Kevin ploughed straight into the back of us. He wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t realise we had stopped. And he was going 55mph.

I still remember the whiplash. All the instrument knobs on the dashboard — the wipers, the radio, the headlights — were loose. And the moment we were hit I remember the chrome shapes that looked like satellites lifting off the dashboard and flying past me in slow motion. I found them later in the back seat.

Kevin pushed our car through the rest of the left turn and into the parking lot. The moment after we came to a halt my sister was screaming: “The car’s going to explode! Get out! The car’s going to explode!” So I ran round to her side to get her out. By which time the whole school was filling up the parking lot.

I don’t remember Kevin having a scratch on him, although his car was completely destroyed. And he totalled the rear end of the Corillian cruiser.

The whole thing got messy because Kevin didn’t have auto insurance. His parents tried to claim that Heidi was driving, not me. And since she was 15, somehow it was our fault.

Because it was such a small place — Burbank in Washington state, a farm town with less than 600 people — it created a really bad energy. We never did get any compensation. So nobody got anything. I still get a displaced cervical disc every now and then, but that was it."

Chuck Palahniuk is best known as the author of Fight Club. His new book, Diary, is out now