Halfway: A Memoir

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Synopsis

From a searing new literary voice, a raw, compulsively readable memoir about a young man seeking hope, community, and ultimately recovery from addiction in a series of halfway houses and boys’ homes—the first book to so vividly capture this world.

In his late teens Tom Macher rebelled against a world that seemed stacked against him. Raised in a broken family and estranged from an absentee father suffering with AIDS, Macher turned to alcohol to escape the painful loneliness of his reality.

In quick succession, he is kicked out of school, and then his mother’s house, sent to a boys’ home in Montana, and later, a halfway house in a truck-stop town of Louisiana. It was there that Macher encounters a community of young men struggling to survive—outcasts and thieves, liars and ex-cons, men seeking redemption, men running from the past. As he moves further away from boyhood and embraces a hard-won sobriety, these men—the broken, the hardscrabble, the near gone—become his salvation.

Macher captures the trials of sobriety—suicide, death, recovery—and the unusual beauty that forms in the bonds of those who suffer. In visceral, striking prose, he introduces the unforgettable characters he meets along the way, from a former child actor, a young teen struggling with schizophrenia, a tough-love addiction counselor, a sex-addicted social worker, to Matt O, who became Macher’s loyal friend and wingman. Raw, disarming, frenetic, and subversive, Halfway is a brutally honest portrait of the world of down-and-out recovering alcoholics, and a story of how, in their darkest hour, these men create the bonds that form a family.

Chapters

  • 01 Halfway Open

    Duration: 40s
  • 02 Halfway Prologue

    Duration: 04min
  • 03 Halfway Chapter1 Unripe

    Duration: 08min
  • 04 Halfway Chapter2 Bastard

    Duration: 07min
  • 05 Halfway Chapter3 PieceOfShit

    Duration: 40min
  • 06 Halfway Chapter4 Then&Now

    Duration: 13min
  • 07 Halfway Chapter5 BoysHome

    Duration: 28min
  • 08 Halfway Chapter6 Lessons

    Duration: 11min
  • 09 Halfway Chapter7 Bullies

    Duration: 31min
  • 10 Halfway Chapter8 Mexico

    Duration: 06min
  • 11 Halfway Chapter9 TheHouse

    Duration: 36min
  • 12 Halfway Chapter10 OneStep

    Duration: 20min
  • 13 Halfway Chapter11 SomeOf

    Duration: 29min
  • 14 Halfway Chapter12 Hostages

    Duration: 10min
  • 15 Halfway Chapter13 TheEdge

    Duration: 25min
  • 16 Halfway Chapter14 Calling

    Duration: 15min
  • 17 Halfway Chapter15 YearRounders

    Duration: 18min
  • 18 Halfway Chapter16 LosAngeles

    Duration: 22min
  • 19 Halfway Chapter17 MissA

    Duration: 04min
  • 20 Halfway Chapter18 Testimony

    Duration: 34min
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