Hole in My Life

Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004
208 pages
Warning: This novel does contain explicit language, homosexual and sexual content, drugs and details on escaping prison and committing various crimes worthy of being placed in prison.
Genre: Non-fiction, autobiography, journey, drugs, self-discovery.

This is the self discovery story of young adult author Jack Gantos and his journey from St. Croix to New York in a small ship with 2,000 pounds of hashish. Gantos successfully makes the journey, only to be caught. He concludes his story with the harsh details of prison life, unromantic and raw. Gantos tells how he escaped, and the change which happened within him.

Here is an excerpt from the novel:

"The prisoner in the photograph is me. The ID number is mine. The photo was taken in 1972 at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky. I was twenty-one years old and had been locked up for a year already -- the bleakest year of my life -- and I had more time ahead of me.

At the time this picture was taken I weighed 125 pounds. When I look at my face in the photo I see nothing but the pocked mask I was hiding behind. I parted my hair down the middle and grew a mustache in order to look older and tougher, and with the greasy prison diet (salted chicken gizzards in a larded gravy, chicken wings with oily cheese sauce, deep-fried chicken necks), and the stress, and the troubled dreams of capture and release, there was no controlling the acne. I was overmatched."

I also found the following activity helpful for teaching this book:

"I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.” How does this quote from Oscar Wilde (found on the epigraph page) reflect the major theme of this book? How does Gantos change as a result of what he has done wrong? What does he “become” that might not have happened without his experiences in prison?

This is my response to this activity. Gantos, in the book, buried a stash of drugs in central park before he goes to his sentencing. He plans to dig the drugs back up once he is out of prison and returns to his normal life. After Gantos is let out of prison, he goes to the water fountain in central park, near the burial spot. He knows the exact number of steps he must take from that water fountain to retrieve the drugs. But, he does not go toward the drugs, deciding, "My heart wasn't in it. I would not let myself make that kind of mistake again...what remains of the rotted hash is hidden in the hole I dug for it" (200).