July 15, 2019

The Light Years

Chris Rush's memoir tells a beautiful, often violent story of drug trafficking, gay youth, homelessness, sins of the fathers, and the search for personal freedom in America.
More like this story
As a child growing up wedged in the middle of a large Catholic family in 1960s New Jersey, Tucson painter Chris Rush was given LSD by his older sister. He was 12. Nearly 50 years later, he published his first book, The Light Years, with the venerated publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A memoir, the book follows Rush across the country to Tucson, telling a beautiful, often violent story of drug trafficking, gay youth, homelessness, sins of the fathers, and the search for personal freedom in America, in strikingly evenhanded prose. Near the end of the book, he turns 20.

Producer: Mike Powell
Photographer/Editor: Andrew Brown
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