Halfway

November 27, 2017
First-time author Macher delivers a powerful memoir about his years in a series of boys’ homes and halfway houses, from his teens through his 20s, as he dealt with a chemical dependency that made him “the worst kind of kid—fearless and empty.” Although Macher details a youth defined by his parents’ broken marriage followed by his mother’s unemployed life and an often homeless existence for him and his brother, he is never self-pitying. Of his descent into alcoholism, he writes, “As much as I liked being drunk, being blacked out was much, much better.” Macher was kicked out of high school and was sent to a boys’ home in Montana and then to a half-way house in Louisiana, where he struggled with various recovery programs and lived among a motley crew of “delinquents, petty thieves, dropouts, strong-arm men, trafficker, pimps”—many of whom became his surrogate family. As he overcame his addictions, Macher began to realize that he and his friends all had a thing inside them “at once horrible and beautiful... each one of us lucky, unlucky, blessed, bewitched, and doomed.” Macher’s carefully crafted, unsparing look at his troubled life is reminiscent of Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries.