"Hole in my Life" by Jack Gantos

I typically dislike memoirs.  The travel writer Paul Thereaux identifies a type of complaining while bragging that afflicts travel writing ("I hadn't showered in nearly TWO DAYS when I arrived at my hotel in Bali and handed my bags to the valet") and to an extent I think that this infects memoir as well.  Most memoirs just make me want to say to the author, "hey man, we all have problems."  The worst examples of the genre are either self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing, or just plain made up.  It's like being cornered at a party by the most boring person in the room, and being unable to break away to talk to any of the cool people you see across the way (the cool people in this metaphor being other non-fiction books).  Not once but twice for Library Journal did I have to review the memoir of some Hollywood producer who went on for PAGES about how much money he was paid to produce certain television shows.  Specific dollar amounts.  For pages.  This is usually what I think of when I think of memoir.

Hole in my Life is none of those things.  It's witty, insightful, self-deprecating, and Jack Gantos has led the kind of life that has given him a unique set of experiences to write about, and a unique voice with which to do so.  In fact, one of the main themes of the earlier parts of the book is how the young Gantos, an aspiring writer, realized he had nothing to write about and set out to liven up his life.  He bounces up and down the East Coast working various jobs and meeting various seedy characters.  Eventually, he finds himself agreeing to help sail a boat loaded with hash up the eastern seaboard to New York in exchange for $10,000 which he hopes to use to get into college and study writing.

Needless to say, the whole thing goes metaphorically south (the whole thing goes literally north) and Gantos finds himself in prison.  The remainder of the book is a hard, honest look at the decisions that led Gantos to his incarceration, and the consequences.  A particularly moving scene sees Gantos's father and uncle arrive at the prison stinking drunk, which is the only way his father could muster the courage to see his son living inside a prison.

The only quibble I had with the book is that there is a reference some piece of classic literature on practically every single page.  This is the same problem I have with Tim O'Brien.  You only need to drop so many of those before you fail in the attempt to convince the reader you are well-read and instead come off sounding desperate to place yourself among Other Serious Writers.  I randomly picked a 20 page span, pages 30-50, and found references to Flannery O'Connor, Go Ask Alice, Jack Keroac and On the Road, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Edmund O. Wilson, Stephen Crane and Red Badge of Courage, Ernest Hemingway, and John Hersey.  Holy cow!  At a certain point it gets to be distracting.

There are many directions to take readalongs for this book.  For other examples of true crime in the 60s and 70s, you can pick up either of Nicholas Pileggi's books, Wiseguy or Casino, which were turned into the films Goodfellas and Casino respectively and feature much more competent criminals.  If you got interested in the nautical portions of Gantos's tale and are interested in reading about how non-smugglers sail the high sees, check out Joshua Slocum's awesome, epic, hilarious recounting of that time he was the first person to sail alone around the world, aptly entitled Sailing Alone Around the World.  Or, you could pick up any of the innumerable books that Gantos mentions in Hole in my Life.