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"I sat down on the dock. The river smelled like something dead. The sky was gray. I sat there and cried. I felt sad, and I hated myself for it. I felt beaten, and I hated myself for that. I didn't have one friend. I couldn't write one word. I was just waiting for the day to arrive when my entire life would pivot. And I was sure things were not going to pivot my way"

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Gantos' explains how he built up his career. Then he explains why he wrote Hole In My Life.

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Jack Gantos on his memoir "Hole in My Life"

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All I heard was the number--ten thousand dollars, cash. This was the jackpot. The answer I was looking for. My exit from St.Croix and my entrance to whatever good school would have me. I didn't think of the danger involved with breaking the law. I didn't even consider that I had no idea how to sail a large boat, or that Hamilton might kill me and dump my body off the coast of New Jersey --that anything bad could possibly happen."

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Jack Gantos was still in high school when he was nineteen and living with a family friend in Ft. Lauderdale to finish high school. After being kicked out of the house he moved to a motel. After finishing school he moved back in with his family in St. Croix. His father lost his company and they were forced to  work making shipping crates. There are alot of drug smugglers in this area and one in particular, Rik, asked for a special crate from Gantos, in order to smuggle hash. Rik offers Gantos a job smuggling the drugs to New York. Gantos was an aspiring writer just out of high school looking for money. He needed the money for college tuition and a way out of his terrible job. He agreed to to help sail a sixty-foot yacht  from the Virgin Islands to New York City, for ten thousand dollars. He and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. Gantos had to serve up to six years in prison. Gantos is taken to Ashford prison in Kentucky, where there is a huge amount a violence. Gantos offers his services to the prison hospital. The physician’s assistant accepts him as his X-ray tech and Gantos is saved from general population and the horrors he suspects wait within. After experiencing and learning about all if the violence, Gantos begins to write about the violence chronologically. He then finds his voice as a writer by embracing the violent and bleak reality of his life and the life of those around him. He made a plan to attend school and get an early prison release. He applied to college and was accepted. Gantos leaves the prison and realizes he had the ability to write but lacked the motivation and experience.

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Hole in my life won the Best Books For Young Adults in 2003

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When I told my school friends where I lived they thought I was joking. For most of them I might as well have been living in the Black Hole of Calcutta. When my drinking buddy, Will, came to visit, he was always nervous his new Camaro would get broken into or stolen. And when any of the motel kids knocked on my door for a treat (I always kept bags of candy from the store in my room), my friends reeled back in horror as if the kids had lice, ringworm, or rabies. But after meeting my neighbors they'd relax and realize that the people on the other side of the tracks were warm-blooded, could tell good stories, and were as curious about white high school kids as we were about them. I named my room the " Bad Attitude Clearing House."'

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"And just like that I fell into the best job in the prison.I got to keep my private cell. The medical staff trained me to use the X-ray machine and develop the film, and from then on I was always the first one called to X-ray the men who were injured during the night -- especially those who lived in the hundred-and- twenty-man dormitories, where one the lights were off you could stealthily roam from bunk to bunk and settle a score with anyone. And they did."

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There is a sample of the audiobook. The samples is talking about how Gantos' dad would tell Jack all about the criminals in Ft. Lauderdale.  Gantos' dad had dirt on almost everybody in the area. (Sample is right under the book cover)

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Becoming a writer the hard wayIn the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Isl...

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Jack Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and grew up in a town called Norvelt. In school, he was apart of a group called the Bluebird reading group. Which he later found out was for slow readers and to this day he would rather be called a bluebird instead of a slow reader.  Hes worked on many children books and published his first book in 1976 called Rotten Ralph. (Link below for more information about him)

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JACK GANTOS has written books for readers of all ages, from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults. His works include Hole in My Life, a memoir that won the Michael L. Printz and Robert F. Sibert honors; Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, a National Book Award Finalist, Joey Pigza Loses Control, a Newbery Honor book, and Dead End in Norvelt, the 2012 Newbery Medal Winner and the Scott O'Dell Award Winner for Best Historical Fiction.

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JACK GANTOS has written books for readers of all ages, from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults. His works include Hole in My Life, a memoir that won the Michael L. Printz and Robert F.

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This story won the Notable Children's Book award in 2003

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This is the drug they tried to smuggle to New York. Hash is a drug made from cannabis. Hashish is cannabis resin. It is consumed by smoking a small piece, typically in a pipe, bong, vaporizer or joint, or via oral ingestion