(RNS) — “I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years. It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star, but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard.”

— Former first lady Laura Bush, in an excerpt of her upcoming memoir Spoken from the Heart, on the 1963 car accident in which she ran a stop sign and killed a fellow student. Excerpts were published by The New York Times.