Wasted Youth

"Wasted Youth is James Wright's vivid and emphatically unromantic memoir of his late teens and early twenties, when his life derived its meager meaning from consuming drugs and alcohol, dodging authority, and simply staying alive day to day. Relentlessly self-critical, Wright is not looking for pity or even sympathy from his reader. But the reader can't help but extend it anyway, knowing from the evidence of this beautifully written book the great potential that was once in danger of being lost."

Richard J. Maiman, author of A Man for all Branches

"James Wright’s “Wasted Youth: Reflections” yanked me out of my preconception of what this book would be and instantly transported me back to distant memories of my youth, a time in the 60s when I lived in a stiff and non-convergent parallel to Mr. Wright’s experiences, my own soul-cult of sorts. Yet, insulated as I was as a girl and married too early, I was seduced deeply into the same wonderings and rebellions. Such is the relatability of this book, a story for all ages with every earmark of a classic.

"What kept me turning page after page was not only the gifted writing, where even the mundane is threaded with menace and meaning, but also the immediacy. His bright threads of sight and sound and touch and smell weave with both grace and abrupt discord through his often, non-linear sequences…the stark and wonderful imagery of the time. The sounds of the streets, the desert heat, the glory of the mountains, the death tangle of the Manzanita forests, and the clang of the jail cell door, pull me back and through this period, the significance of which I nearly missed during my own wasted youth, for there are many ways to “waste.”

"The story alone makes the book worth reading. The fact that Wright’s prose is self-reflective unto self-flagellation, yet simultaneously expressing the seeds of redemption, is as nuanced as the real learning of the boy and young man he was. Wright’s raw honesty is humbling. His deep searching for meaning and relevance through his early life leads us through his, as well as our own, valleys of death.

"Wright’s title suggests, no insists, that his youth was wasted. Then he proves that it was not; that the necessary quality of his learning might never have been achieved in any other manner and that nothing is ever truly wasted when there is learning, learning fortified by bibliotherapy, probably the only form acceptable to him in those moments when exactly the right book, the right quote, presented from the page of one or another of his beloved readings. Mr. Wright proves this unwastedness repeatedly, lifting us from the wild streets flanking Berkeley to the uncharted pathways leading up and into his real and metaphorical mountains, all moated by the most vicious underbrush.

"I found Mr. Wright’s endearing dedication to his wife at the end of his chronicled adventures “there and back” to be the quintessential proof of his learning. Of course, I cried.

"James Wright, there are worlds between your lines. Please give us a sequel."

Shirley Willis, author of Naked Teaching: A Love Story