Light Years

Lambda Literary Award Finalist | A New York Times Book Review Editors'' ChoiceNamed a best book of 2019 by ParadeThe Light Years is a joyous and defiant coming-of-age memoir set during one of the most turbulent times in American historyThis stunningly beautiful original memoir is driven by a search for the divine a quest that leads Rush into some dangerous places . . . The Light Years is funny harrowing and deeply tender. ―Kate Tuttle The L.A. TimesRush is a fantastically vivid writer whether he’s remembering a New Jersey of ''meatballs and Windex and hairspray'' or the dappled dangerous beauty of Northern California where ''rock stars lurked like lemurs in the trees.'' Read if you loved… Just Kids by Patti Smith. ―Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly“As mythic and wild with love possibility and danger as the decades it spans you’ll read The Light Years with your breath held. Brutal buoyant and wise to the tender terror of growing up Chris Rush has written a timeless memoir of boyhood in the American wilderness.” ―Emma Cline author of The GirlsChris Rush was born into a prosperous fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house the flawless hostess mom and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that amid the upheaval of the late 1960s was destined to fracture their precarious facade. His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine who places a tab of acid on twelve-year-old Rush’s tongue proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug purchase 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. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge for the divine for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels―from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence―it is a miracle he is still alive.The Light Years is a prayer for vanished friends an odyssey signposted with broken and extraordinary people. It transcends one boy’s story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. This is a riveting heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation as Rush faces his lost childhood and finally himself.