Hole In My Life
Jack Gantos (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
2002 Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 0374399883
In 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer desperate for adventure, college cash & a way out of a dead-end job.
Before a writer writes a book, he has to have a past. Before Jack Gantos wrote the children's books for which he has become known & respected, which are, by the way, brilliant, energetic & absorbing reads -- he had to get some experience in living.
Few of us would have chosen the fork in the road which young Jack Gantos took, faced with a desperate need for cash for college where he hoped to become “a writer.” As a naive smuggler, his career didn't last long. It is, however, out of that struggle & ultimate confinement, that the writer I so enjoy, grew, with his unique, taut & restless language.
In this memoir of a coming of age in a world beset by poverty, where opportunities for fast money present themselves in the guise of simple adventures, this young man made some choices. Perhaps the worst of which was to align himself with a couple of incompetent crooks looking for easy money. Except nothing about the smuggling business is easy, & this youngster finds himself in a bewildering underworld where nothing is as it seems, & getting caught has dire consequences.
It is, however, getting caught that saves this thinking young man. It is in prison that he learns how to really write, & how to stay out of trouble. It is the confinement, the paring away of everything except the here & now, that he discovers himself & how to think. & after he's paid his dues, he finds the written word carries him out of despair & danger.
A super memoir of a youth well spent on ill-gotten gains. Of the chances he got to take other forks in the road on his way to redemption. He did his work, he wrote his words, & then got on with his life as a writer.
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