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Overview
Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating in alcohol, depression, and isolation. He fled Hollywood for Boston where he reclaimed a faith he had thought he was too sophisticated to embrace. In this moving memoir, Wakefield returns to his religious roots and his early life: his Indiana boyhood, his tumultuous student days, and his growth as a writer.
Synopsis
A grippingly honest account of how one man succeeded in filling the emptiness at the core of his soul.
--RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER, author of
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
One of the most important memoirs of the spirit I've ever read.
--BILL MOYERS
Publishers Weekly
Wakefield (Going All the Way et al.) sweeps us up into his life story, which begins here at a fearful moment. At age 48, he awoke screaming in panic and fled from Hollywood to Boston in search of treatment for stress and later for a deeper malady, spiritual emptiness. He recalls growing up an indulged only son in Indiana, studying at Columbia University during the 1950s, becoming a New Yorker and rejecting his Protestant faith. He writes about his professors, classmates and others met on the road to his successful career as a writer. Eloquently, he recreates his initial steps in regaining his religious faith. Wakefield expresses gratitude to those with whom he attended a course at a parish house in Boston, instruction that forms the foundation of this compelling testament. (March)