Something to Think About

Gerard Jelloe

Hole in My Life
By Jack Gantos
 
It was astonishing to read about all the events that happened throughout Jack Gantos’s young adult life. Jack Gantos did not grow up in a stable environment as he lived a sort of nomad life. Gantos went trough tough times when he moved from Fort Lauderdale to Puerto Rico in the middle of his junior year, then back to Florida and later to the Virgin Islands where racial tension started to build up. Gantos wanted to get away from the tension any way he could and because of his desperation, he ends up getting into a drug smuggling operation and then gets caught by federal agents. It is the drastic changes in plot throughout the book that make you turn the page to learn more. We all experience in life the situation where we can choose what we want to do or choose what we should do; Gantos, “ was nineteen, still stuck in high school, and …...had unlimited freedom,”(19) to choose what he wanted and did not forsee a bad outcome from that. All while you are reading, these quick changes piece together to really tell his story about his restless final year of high school, his short-lived career as a criminal, his time in prison and how he became the award winning author that he is today.

Although you think to yourself that this is an easy read consisting of just a bunch of crazed stories with simple diction, behind the crazed stories is the story of how Gantos changed from wishing to be a writer to living his dream writing. He read voraciously, kept journals full of ideas, yet didn't feel he had anything worth writing about. Chasing his dream to evolve himself as a mature adult and a proper writer, he believed -with influence of admirable authors- that, he needed to “let go”. As time goes on, his criminal life continued until he got caught for drug trafficking and was sentenced to 6 years in prison. Although he wasn't allowed to keep a journal, his lifeline was a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov , in which he scratched his thoughts, fears, and all the “getting caught stories”(110) in the tiny spaces between the lines. Time alone helped him to re-evaluate this and other beliefs. It also allowed him to become what he'd always wanted to be, because he found the focus and dedication needed to write seriously. I guess you could say prison was good for him; it helped him endure and ultimately overcome the worst experience of his life through writing.

I would recommend this book to all teenagers looking for a simple biography telling the story of a young person who has been through a lot and what that person did to deal with it and overcome it. I feel that Gantos was really able to connect with teens on a more personable level because it revolves his life as a teen and what he got out of. For teens that might be going through a rough patch, writing like Gantos, whether it be serious or random, could really help get through life. In terms of the writing style, it is nothing formal but still well written. Gantos describes things through slang words and expressions to give a sense of the culture but also provides meaning to the at the bottom of the page for people who might not understand it. For example, he says “access your genetic library all the way back to cellular experience”(55) which he says at the bottom of the page just means “recover memories from the beginning of mankind”.  Little things like this make a book more enjoyable for a reader and did make it more enjoyable for me. The book can be tiresome, as it goes off on a tangent at times, but it brings up many ideas to think about and topics for debate. It will leave you emotionally attached and have you thinking about life a little differently.