Bad jobs and poor decisions : dispatches from the working class : a memoir / J.R. Helton.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2018]Edition: First editionDescription: 259 pages ; 22 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781631492877
- 163149287X
- Dispatches from the working class
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | Biography | Helton, J. H484 | Available | 33111008700698 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
In the 1980s, somewhere in Austin, Helton was young, married, and jobless. After a few strung-out years trying to make it as a writer, he was caught in a cycle of drunken, coked-up nights, crashing on friends' couches and looking for money in the morning. Succumbing to the daunting reality of what it means to support both himself and a troubled marriage, he became a housepainter. He sold pumpkins on the side of the road, delivered firewood, ran a crew of illegal immigrants hauling railroad ties across the empty plains of Kansas, and then he painted even more.
Despair is transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual labor. Along the way, the people toiling beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years are brought to vivid life: the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and the racists, as well as Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paintbrush and deadbeat fathers straining to pay child support.
With intoxicating, blasé-faire sentiment, Helton shows that everyone--from the beauties at the rodeo to the lowest laborers--is tethered by a common desire to just pay the bills and balm the loneliness. A raw and moving account, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions captures a microcosm of left-behind America that straddles a dangerous line between ruin and redemption.
Prologue: 1989 -- Other people -- Halloween -- Kansas -- Sweetheart of the rodeo -- Finding the cure for cancer -- Epilogue: 1989.
"The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means to support himself and a troubled wife. That despair is transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual labor. Along the way, he introduces us to the real people toiling beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years: the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and racists, as well as Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paint brush, dead-beat fathers straining to pay child support, and the casual murderer. Raw and moving, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions captures a microcosm of tattered America that straddles that dangerous line between ruin and redemption."--Provided by publisher.