No “Stopping” reading this book: Oran Canfield’s bizarre memoir truly uplifting

Through no fault of my own, I am unable to go more than a few hours without picking up a book or a magazine or a newspaper. I’ll even read the ingredients on the shampoo bottle if no such item is present in the bathroom. Whether it is the quality of material that I am reading, or my desire to please my librarian older sister combined with my upbringing, it seems that I have read more in the last three years of my life than the previous 22 combined. Maybe it’s that I am just getting older.
Thankfully, my librarian sister happened to pick up a few (and I use the term “few” lightly) books for my family and I from a conference she attended a couple of months ago. She brought in a tote bag that was toting at least 60 books and passed them out as if she the Santa Claus of tomes and paperbacks and pop-ups.
Now, I am quite aware of the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but one of the books she deemed suitable for my tastes had a cover that grabbed my attention immediately. However, being near the end of the sixth Harry Potter novel (yes, I’ve read the entire series… and now I’m re-reading it), I was not able at that moment to pick it up. Still, I made a mental note to get back to it and how lucky I am that I did.
The book was “Long Past Stopping,” a memoir written by Oran Canfield about his insanely bizarre, extremely adventurous and wildly experimental life. The wonderful thing about “Long Past Stopping” was the fact that Canfield has actually achieved what his father Jack Canfield has only claimed to have done over the last few decades, and that is write a truly inspirational, uplifting and life-changing book.
The elder Canfield is the mind behind the mega-best-selling “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series and while I do not doubt that these books have an impact on the reader, I do not believe that impact to be more than a short lasting, cheap attempt to raise goose bumps or get the reader to shed a tear.
Oran’s work, on the other hand, is a story that will stay with you for weeks, if not months after putting it down, which if you can do before you finish it is quite a feat in itself. A good book can get into your head for a few days before you open to the first page of your next adventure, but a great book will make its home there for a while, interrupting your thought process throughout the day and altering the way you felt before you read it. “Stopping” is the latter.
Chronicling both his childhood and his agonizing struggle with drug addiction, Canfield uses a very stylistic form of writing that allows him to tell two stories at once while each melds into a smooth flow. The jumping back and forth from past to present is not an original writing tool, but the book still maintains it own uniqueness when it comes to using the concept. Honestly, I feel like this was the only way to write this book.
I’ve never used drugs nor have I ever struggled with addiction, yet I found my attention so rapt to his story that my attitudes during the day were effected by where I was in the book and what I had just read. It was as if the outcome of something in my life was contingent upon the outcome of his, and for any author to get that out a reader is an accomplishment to be proud.
I was completely enthralled and entirely devoted to the struggles of young Oran, the juggling troublemaker getting drunk at eight and trying cocaine at thirteen, as well as the older Oran, the strung out junkie going through these pits of depression and just digging deeper as he tries to right the ship. I actually found myself getting angry at the older Oran as he went through rehab after rehab and then consequently, relapse after relapse.
Yet in the end, after I had finished reading this book outside underneath a bright sun, I truly felt better about myself and where my life was heading. Not because Oran Canfield’s was so bad, but because here was a man who has struggled from day one; with an absentee and disinterested father, a crazy mother with mixed up priorities, strained relationships with everyone he has ever met and the constant self-doubt and criticism that he forced upon himself daily, yet he came through the other side. He did not even have to write this book to be inspirational, but Canfield did and he did a really, damn good job.
I cannot force you to read this book, but I can certainly highly (and I do mean “highly”) recommend you drop into to your nearest bookstore and drop the $25.99 necessary to read a story you never thought could be written. Oran Canfield has done something amazing here with “Long Past Stopping” and I suggest you experience it before it just rolls right on by.

"Long Past Stopping" Approval Rating: 5 out of 5