Long Past Stopping: A Memoir

by Oran Canfield

Book Overview

Oran Canfield--son of self-help guru and Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield--tells his surreal story of growing up in Long Past Stopping. In this remarkable memoir, writing with a wry and cutting edge, Canfield relates tales of a childhood in flux--being buffeted about among family friends, relatives, rebels, and born-again circus clowns, in an anarchist private school, communes, and libertarian enclaves--and of a young adulthood spent...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061450766
• ISBN13: 9780061450761
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 3.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Engrossing Bio: Tragic and Hopeful

Unlike most of us, Oran Canfield has lived several lives in less than 30 years. His odyssey has more phases and turns than many will ever experience but ultimately his addictions keep him prisoner. But that's beside the point. This is a really great read regardless of how I feel about his life. And here's why: Instead of a typically standard timeline, Canfield takes two tracks, simultaneously, and weaves one around the other. In the first, we witness a child slowly becoming a man. His strange journey through oddball alternative schools, summer camps and traveling circuses read like a fantasy gone wrong. It's Fellini-as-life but the film won't end. This serves as his colorful background to the second, equally important but certainly less light-hearted track. The second reveals the man as he goes through an endless and depressing cycle of addiction/rehab/addiction. Creating his book without the first track would be wrist-slitting, leaving readers hopeless. Canfield is just that deeply addicted to nearly every thing he gets his hands on. He crushes our hopes for him ad nauseum. The chapters dealing with his unending, bottomless drug sprees are highly frustrating to read. But the fact that I had to continue on proved he trapped me. I liked him in spite of himself. When a writer can do that, it says something. And the device of two tracks serves as a balance rather than an annoyance. The book's tone is cynical and jaded as they come and in parts, extremely humorous. Considering what the man has been through, (mostly by his own hand) it's no surprise. With an upbringing by what could only be described as an uncompromisingly selfish feminist mother and a mostly-absent author father, he basically raises himself and the result is an excruciating example of how not to parent and why. The very things you are supposed to do with a child - set boundries, help guide, create consistency, punish if necessary - are not only absent in large part but are purposely absent. This gives young Oran the perfect canvas to paint a wildly creative but near-hopeless future. He can't reign himself in because he's never been given the tools with which to do so. Add to this picture a set of highly-questionable role models and the result morphs into the drug-addled adult we see later. That he's survived to write this brilliant autobiography is nothing short of a miracle. The writing is strong in this very personal saga. You get a realistic, first-hand look at what life is like for someone hopelessly addicted to heroin. It's not romantic or pretty and it's heartbreaking. Canfield writes it in a way that keeps our interest levels high, even though the subject matter is downright horrible. Like the video from a crime scene security cam, each chapter is written in gritty detail and we can't look away. A subtle sense of humor is sporadically injected to help give us a bit of relief. Even his short chapter descriptions are a sign that this is a man who sees the funny side of th

The Funniest Addiction Memoir Ever!

I've read a lot of memoirs with addiction as a central theme, and this is by far not only the most accurate, but also the funniest. As a recovering addict myself, I have first hand experience on all of the weird habits and behaviors, and the seemingly never-ending cycle of rehab/relapse. Canfield obviously speaks from experience, and has had enough hindsight to put it all in perspective, unlike other books by authors still on a pink cloud or who have found god and think you should too. As an added bonus, he's the son of new age guru Jack Canfield, and the glimpses into the real life of that man are priceless, funny, and all too human. Oran has also had enough time to get over blaming everything on his dad, yet still being true to some of the events that weren't so pretty between them. In the end, he has no answers for me or for you. He can't even really explain how recovery finally stuck, and for anyone in long term sobriety who has seen people come and go (especially the ones who did everything right and still couldn't make it) nothing could be more true, frustrating, and humbling.

I laughed out loud as many times as I cried...

I am extremely proud of my son and the book he has written. From its inception it has been the source of a profound healing in our family. I am grateful for his courage in recounting his journey, as difficult as it was for him to revisit all these painful moments in his experience in growing up into the incredible man of integrity he has become. It was two years ago when my son Oran told me he was writing a memoir about his childhood--growing up with an absentee father, an unconventional mother, travelling with a circus when he was nine years old, going to middle school in Berkeley during the eighties, being educated in an alternative high school in Sedona, Arizona, his long, slow descent into the drug culture ending up with a heroin addiction, and his rocky (but eventually successful) road to recovery. When I asked him what the title was, he hesitated to tell me. I sensed he was afraid that I would be angry about it. Over a series of calls I finally convinced him to tell me the title of his memoir, and when I heard it, Give Me Some Bread with My Chicken Soup, I thought it was a hell of a good title. Over time, as Oran began to trust that I really was in support of his writing the book, he finally agreed to show me some of the chapters he had written. Reading the chapters he sent was very difficult. My reactions were all over the map. On the one hand, I found myself getting angry and thinking, That didn't happen that way; that's not what I said, and that's not now how I remember it. And on the other hand I was feeling a great deal of sadness, pain, remorse and regret. Oh my God, did that really happen? Did he really go through that? I can't believe he had to suffer through that experience. There were places where I felt like Oran had totally misread me and misinterpreted my intentions. I felt like the person I was and the person who was being portrayed in his book were not the same person. In fact, I remember that about a week after he had sent the chapters for me to read, my wife asked me to call Oran and talk to him, and I yelled something like, "Why would I want to talk to someone who hates me!" But as I reread those chapters and later the complete manuscript, I began to realize how, through the eyes of his experience, he could have perceived things the way he did. My compassion for the pain of his childhood, the isolation and loneliness he experienced, the fear that often overpowered him, the distrust, the cynicism, and the protective mechanisms that he had developed all made perfect sense to me. How could it have been otherwise? Having now read the book in its entirety, I am truly amazed that Oran survived his childhood as well as he did. He is one very strong and resilient individual, and I respect him for that. As painful as it has been to confront the psychological damage created by my divorce from Oran's mother and the years of separation caused by my own fears and lack of awareness at some crucial times in Oran's growing up, the w

Brilliant.

This is probably the best book I've read all year. "Long Past Stopping" is definitely a page turner, I've never been so eager to find out what happens to the protagonist of a story before, nor do I remember reading through a book so fast with exception to maybe "The Stranger" or "Perfume" As memoirs go, this is a story about the life of Oran Canfield... as you discover is the son of Jack Canfield, the author of all those Chicken Soup books... which is hardly relevant to the story, but it does seem to give you an overwhelming sense of the challenges and obstacles that life can often bring us. Oran has lived such a rich and amazing life full of experiences and situations that most of us couldn't even dream about, yet I found it so depressing in many ways. I've never felt so much sympathy for someone that I couldn't decide if deserves it or doesn't. The only thing I wasn't sure about initially was the way the chapters were arranged. Each chapter alternates between adulthood and childhood. Initially I found this distracting and disruptive to the pacing of the book, but as I continued to read I found that he intentionally does this to interweave certain childhood experiences with more recent ones. He'll plant seeds for you in stories of his childhood that you pick up on and become more relevant in a situation he has in his twenties. I later discovered that it makes the pacing genius, as he ends each chapter with a teeth grinding nail-biter that you are forced to wait for two chapters to find out the outcome. Of course, the story isn't told in a constant chronological line. Oran will sometimes jump through a couple years in just a couple sentences, picking and choosing the more relevant experiences in his life... but there couldn't be a better way for us to be experiencing Oran's complete life right along side him. Beautifully and cleverly written with the right amount of humor mixed in with some real tear-jerkers. Though Oran lived and continues to live an exquisitely unique life, I'd be surprised if a lot of people couldn't relate to at least some of what Oran has experienced. A must buy.