In Hole in My Life, this prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle and confinement that marked the end of his own youth. For his part in the conspiracy, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. I might not like some of his books (even loving and hating books in the same series) but this book was a winner and deserves its place among must-read memoirs for young adults.From the Newbery Award–winning author of Dead End in Norvelt, this is a memoir about becoming a writer the hard way. It pulls you right into the immediacy of his experiences and powerfully evokes his evolution not only as a man, but also as a writer. His writing style was clear and concise, and not without humor. He had a wealth of fascinating life experiences (living in a city in the throe of race riots where white people were fleeing in droves, going to a high school that used to be a prison) and met a lot of really interesting people.
He looked into his motivations and why he did things without putting the blame for his mistakes on other people. I liked how honest Jack Gantos was about his flaws and the bad decisions he had made. Deprived of writing materials, he used a copy of The Brothers Karamazov as a journal and struggled to stay sane in a dangerous environment where he was constantly in danger of sexual assault or worse. He had wanted to write professionally for years but more focused on having life experiences worth writing about than putting pen to paper. Ironically, this was the place where Gantos truly became passionate about his writing. It was a stupid, impulsive crime and they threw the book hard at him, landing him in a ‘medium-security’ prison where an acquaintance (also in for drug charges) was gang-raped the first night there. When Jack Gantos was in his early 20’s, he went to prison for drug smuggling. Jack Gantos is hit-or-miss for me (I thoroughly enjoyed the first two Joey Pigza books, the last one in the JP series and The Trouble in Me were one-star reads.) I was tentative about reading this but it turned out to be one of the better memoirs I’ve read in a long time.
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