Light Years

by Chris Rush

Overview

Lambda Literary Award Finalist | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a best book of 2019 by Parade

The Light Years is a joyous and defiant coming-of-age memoir set during one of the most turbulent times in American history

"This 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. Times

"Rush 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 Girls

Chris 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374294410
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Chris Rush is an award-winning artist and designer whose work is held in various museum collections. The Light Years is his first book.

Reading Group Guide

1. Chris Rush has six siblings: Chuck and Kathy (by 1967, both married with children), his mentor Donna, younger brothers Michael and Steven, and baby Danny. There is a span of two decades between the youngest and the oldest siblings. These children were, in a sense, born into different families, at different times of American history. How do you think this affected their paths in life? In what ways are they different; in what ways similar?

2. Discuss Chris’s parents, Norma and Charlie. How would you characterize them as parents, and how do they each influence Chris’s character and life? Compare Chris’s impulsiveness to his mother’s sometimes manic nature—the constant shopping and vacations. Are mother and son similar in some ways? Also, consider Charlie’s alcoholism and Chris’s drug use. Are Chris and his father very different from one another—or do you see any similarities in their characters?

3. When Chris wakes up in an Albuquerque hospital, his mother wants him to come home with her to New Jersey, but she finally relents and lets him stay with Donna in Arizona. Why do you think she agrees to this? Is Chris’s mother able to protect him at home? What would you have done for your son under similar circumstances?

4. Consider the various strains of religion and spirituality in The Light Years. Chris’s father, Roman Catholic, makes a fortune off organized religion, building churches for the Diocese of Trenton. Vinnie, Donna, and their dealer friends are also devoted to God, though they praise a more psychedelic Jesus. Owen’s family are lapsed Mormons, while Gabriel Green promotes a distinctly New Age view of life. How do these varieties of religious thought affect Chris’s life? Discuss his spiritual path and evolution, as you see it, from Catholic school, to living with Christian hippie drug dealers, to his time praying alone in the desert, looking for UFOs. Ultimately, what do you think he is searching for?

5. Early in the book, Donna tells Chris, “Vinnie thinks Mom and Dad use their money to control me.” Do you believe this is true? Later, Donna is willing to accept only three hundred dollars in pay from the drug dealer Lu, on a fifty-thousand-dollar transaction. Similarly, Chris goes from private-school luxury to being destitute—and then, when suddenly flush with cash from dealing, he continues to live in the desert. Discuss the concept of hippie antimaterialism, and the change in Chris’s thinking when he starts to sell cocaine. Discuss the romantic ideals of the hippie world. Does Chris lose his romanticism by the end of the book?

6. How do Chris’s sexual experiences with Owen compare to losing his virginity with Julie? Does his botched attempt to sleep with Oonagh, his nanny, affect his understanding of himself? How much do you think Chris’s struggles with his sexuality play a role in the difficulties he finds himself in?

7. Did you find the scene of Donna giving birth to Jelissa beautiful or frightening, or both? Discuss Donna’s journey from high school cheerleader to drug runner to young mother with two children. What does Donna want out of life? Does she achieve it?

8. Chapter 29 is titled “Do You Remember Your Past Lives?” In this section, Chris is subjected to a “past-life regression” by Gabriel Green. What does the information that comes out about Chris’s “past life” tell us about Chris’s current life and his family? What does Chris come to realize in this chapter about his father? Lastly, do you see Gabriel Green as a father figure? If so, is he a positive one for Chris?

9. Discuss the progression of Chris’s drug use, from so-called “God-approved substances” (LSD, marijuana) to heroin and cocaine. What drives Chris’s drug use? Was he on a spiritual path, or simply self-medicating? Was there wisdom in Donna telling him to avoid certain drugs? Was Donna a bad influence or a fellow traveler who tried to watch out for him?

10. Discuss the themes of God and the Devil throughout the book. Do you think Chris was genuinely on a spiritual journey, or simply brainwashed? Are spiritual quests, by their nature, antisocial? Does Chris’s spiritual quest put him in danger?

11. A light year is the distance light travels in one year (nearly six trillion miles). How does the metaphor of light traveling an extraordinary distance apply to Chris’s turbulent youth? How does it apply to the experience of looking back on significant events that happened a long time ago?

12. How does Chris’s memoir capture a specific era in America’s cultural history? What seismic shifts took place in American family life during the 1970s? How does hippie drug culture compare to the modern-day opioid epidemic? What, if anything, has changed?

13. Tragically, Chris’s father loses both of his brothers. Do you think that this is the cause of Charlie’s instability and his troubled relationship with his children? Is there a connection between that tragedy and his alcoholism? Does Charlie’s past affect how you feel about him? When his past is finally revealed, did he become a more sympathetic individual for you?

14. Discuss the various families in the book: Chris’s original family; Chris’s new family with Donna and Vinnie, Lu and Jingle; his time living with the Spoons; his family of fellow travelers, such as Sean and Julie. Compare these groups and what was good—or not so good—about them.

15. hen Chris discovers Sean’s history, he observes that the two of them were “the kind of boys people want to kill” (page 241). What does he mean? Discuss the evolution of Chris and Sean’s friendship.

16. On page 365, Chris reflects on his near-deadly descent and writes, “I don’t know why I was saved and others were lost.” Why do you think he survived while others in his circle did not? Was he more vulnerable because he was an artist, or did that help him prevail? Discuss the final section, “One Hundred Pies,” and how it compares to other recovery stories.

17. Is The Light Years a book about love? About drugs? Family? What was at the heart of this story for you?

18. How did the epilogue affect your understanding of fate and free will? When Chris paints his father’s portrait, what does this reveal about their relationhip? Has it changed? Has Chris changed?

Editorial Reviews

Remarkably, [Rush's] beatific innocence remains intact, as does the lightheartedness of the narration. If The Light Years can seem haphazard or uncurated, scribbling hitchhiking routes back and forth across the map, what it sacrifices in reflection on Chris's experience it makes up for in reflection of the culture…What's fresh and interesting about The Light Years is its account of gay survivalism…The rare thing the book offers is a nearly documentary collection of gay and genderqueer kids, and their situations, in the early 1970s…In the tradition of Henry Adams, Richard Rodriguez, Michelle Tea, the book arrives at its genre: an education.

The New York Times Book Review - Brian Blanchfield

★ 11/26/2018
In this vibrant memoir, artist Rush recounts his strange and colorful childhood and adolescence, from his upbringing in an affluent but turbulent New Jersey home to trying to find his place in the 1970s drug and art scene. Eccentric and with an extremely high IQ, Rush was often seen as a problem child, embarrassing his father by making paper flowers or wandering the neighborhood in a pink silk cape. Later, he overheard his father telling his mother, “The boy is a goddamn queer,” and his parents sent him to Catholic boarding school, where he was bullied and expelled a year later for kissing another boy. At home, his favorite sister, Donna, had become involved with a group of hippies who smoked pot, which she introduced to the 11-year-old Rush as a “sacrament.” It was the first time he’d found people who accepted him (“You’re one of us now,” Valentine, a dealer, told him). Thus began Chris’s journey into drug use and the blossoming American counterculture. Rush’s storytelling shines as he travels across the country and back again, searching for truth, love, UFOs in New Mexico, peace, something that feels like God, and a place to call home. This is a mesmerizing record of his journey through adolescence. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

11/15/2018

Award-winning artist Rush may have been raised in a strict Catholic family in New Jersey, but by age 12 he had been introduced to LSD by a friend of his older sister, and he rounded out his teenage years by being tossed from art school and heading to Tucson to buy drugs and enter America's flourishing counterculture. A personal story of his search for belonging that also sums up America's transition from sparkly Sixties to darkening Seventies; an FSG reading group selection attracting interest.

Library Journal

★ 2019-02-04

A dazzling debut memoir from artist and designer Rush.

Growing up in a strict Roman Catholic family in New Jersey, the author felt both trapped and adrift as a child, a feeling exacerbated by his neglectful mother and alcoholic father, who was "a dark planet, exerting only vague astrological influence on his offspring." Introduced to drugs, especially LSD, early on by his loving hippie sister, Donna, Rush continued to chafe under his suburban adolescence before finally setting out on a remarkable journey into the counterculture and across America, from his hometown to the wilderness of the Southwest. By the age of 13, he writes, "I took LSD as often as possible. Taking acid was like entering a painting of a storybook—a glowing dream world, lush and lovely. I felt no conflict between the real and the unreal. It was so easy to slip in between." In sparkling, lucid prose that perfectly captures the joy, depression, anger, and wonder that characterized his adventures, the author recounts the seemingly endless hills and valleys of his unique tale. Among others, these experiences included countless days getting stoned in his parents' basement, avoiding his dysfunctional parents; a stint in boarding school, where he became the primary drug dealer on campus; time living with Donna and a group of her friends on a drug compound in rural Arizona; enduring a shocking act of violence; and some weeks living a feral life in caves scattered around the deserts of the West. Along the way, while struggling with significant substance abuse ("sometimes I'd shoot up with…customers who craved a speechless high, who wanted to grow dim with me, become sputtering candles in the dark") and grappling with his sexuality, Rush continued to draw, an artistic spark that took years to ignite into a career. He also suffered a near overdose. Though the narrative ends on a slight uptick, the author refreshingly avoids tying his story up with a pretty bow, and readers will wish for more from this talented writer.

A captivating, psychedelically charged coming-of-age memoir.

Kirkus Reviews

"This memoir has been described as 'a queering of the wild,' which is an expression I could never forget. A gay child in a prosperous, Roman Catholic family in New Jersey during the ’60s is violently abused by his father, finds respite in a community of spiritual seekers, and embarks on an enlightenment journey that few humans could survive. This memoir will transport you all over the place while you shelter at home."
—Ottessa Moshfegh, Buzzfeed

"This 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. Times

"Rush 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 Girls

"In this vibrant memoir, artist Rush recounts his strange and colorful childhood and adolescence . . . Rush’s storytelling shines as he travels across the country and back again, searching for truth, love, UFOs in New Mexico, peace, something that feels like God, and a place to call home. This is a mesmerizing record of his journey through adolescence." —Publisher's Weekly (starred)

"In sparkling, lucid prose that perfectly captures the joy, depression, anger, and wonder that characterized his adventures, the author recounts the seemingly endless hills and valleys of his unique tale . . . readers will wish for more from this talented writer." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"What’s fresh and interesting about The Light Years is its account of gay survivalism—what it’s like to be rejected or adrift from others’ custody; coupling occasionally; at least once in love; and often in profound solitude in the natural world . . . The Light Years is less a queering of the wilderness than a wilding of queerness . . . In the tradition of Henry Adams, Richard Rodriguez, Michelle Tea, the book arrives at its genre: an education." —Brian Blanchfield, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] lucid miracle of [a] literary masterpiece . . . I wanted to talk to him about how he managed to come through the tsunami of the wildest memoir I’ve read, not only alive, but seemingly improved. How did he write a first book in such dazzling, sparkling prose—so incredibly deft in execution, so precise and artistic in naturalistic descriptions—and so loving in human portraiture? How did he get brought from the desert, to share with us this light?"—Luke Goebel, Vice

"The Light Years Is More Than a Queer Coming-of-Age Story. It’s a Quest for the Divine . . . filled with sentences lit from the inside like [Rush's] paintings" —Alexander Chee, Time

"Chris Rush . . . not only has one hell of a story, he also has the talent to bring it to life. You can open his gorgeous new memoir, The Light Years, to any page and the prose will leap out. It’s funny, charming and effortlessly descriptive." —Aaron Hicklin, Observer

"What’s most surprising, though, is the grace that can emerge from brutality. It’s a relief to read someone who’s waited long enough to not only document his rather extraordinary experience, but most importantly to have the wisdom to understand it . . . It’s hard to fathom how he got out alive. But thank goodness he did." —Minju Pak, T Magazine

“Brace yourself: To enter The Light Years you must be willing to be changed. It is, in the end, about the one question we all must ask ourselves—How does one live? In the end the answer is, always, love. You could wait until you are ready to read this radiant book, though how will you know when that moment arrives?” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“Darkly comic and told with fire and wisdom, The Light Years is an iconic American story, the mad love child of Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Augustin Burroughs.” —Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

“Chris Rush is a gorgeous, evocative writer—able to capture the stifling conventionality of suburbia but also the world of flower children drawn together by spiritual experimentation that all too easily gives way to heartbreak and violence. This moving book becomes a gripping story of resilience and, yes, hope.” —George Hodgman, author of Bettyville

From the Publisher