The light years : a memoir
(Book)

"A joyous and defiant coming-of-age memoir set during one of the most turbulent times in American history. Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But inside the gleaming mid-century house with his flawless hostess mother and thriving businessman father ran unspoken tensions that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, were destined to fracture the precarious façade. The summer after his first year at a Catholic boarding school, Chris's older sister Donna draws him into her orbit, which revolves around the charismatic Valentine, high priest of the new age and entrepreneurial drug dealer. It is Valentine who places the first tab of acid on twelve-year-old Chris's tongue, proclaiming: 'This is a sacrament. You are one of us now.' After an unceremonious expulsion from school, Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug deal and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the West and spends his adolescence looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts in his travels--from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence--it is a miracle he is still alive. A prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey sign posted with broken and extraordinary people, [this book] transcends one boy's story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. In a riveting, heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation, Rush faces his lost childhood and, finally, himself."--Dust jacket.