Kasher in the Rye
The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16
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4.6 • 19 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“The finest, most moving and powerful memoir I have ever read.”—MAYIM BIALIK
Rising young comedian Moshe Kasher is lucky to be alive. He started using drugs when he was just 12. At that point, he had already been in psychoanlysis for 8 years. By the time he was 15, he had been in and out of several mental institutions, drifting from therapy to rehab to arrest to...you get the picture. But Kasher in the Rye is not an "eye opener" to the horrors of addiction. It's a hilarious memoir about the absurdity of it all.
When he was a young boy, Kasher's mother took him on a vacation to the West Coast. Well it was more like an abduction. Only not officially. She stole them away from their father and they moved to Oakland , California. That's where the real fun begins, in the war zone of Oakland Public Schools. He was more than just out of control-his mother walked him around on a leash, which he chewed through and ran away.
Brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Kasher's first literary endeavor finds humor in even the most horrifying situations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this memoir of high-octane intensity, L.A. standup comic Kasher takes "a drug-filled journey through the harrowing years of my youth." Insights abound as he wanders through the "creaky secret rooms" of memory, recalling the teen turmoil that followed his chaotic childhood where "Life was the wound." He begins with the separation of his deaf parents and his mother fleeing New York for the "murderfest" of Oakland, where vitriolic verbal sparring became his weapon in schoolyard conflicts: "I slowly started sharpening my tongue on the whetstone of Oakland Public Schools." At age 13, he began using LSD: "The bad part about mind-expanding drugs when you are 13 years old is that there isn't really much to expand upon." Images by Oakland muralist Ezra Li Eismont illustrate this troubled teen odyssey of friendships, fights, thefts, graffiti tagging, weed, rehab, therapy, and psychiatric lockdown: "One of the coolest things about being locked up in a mental hospital when you're 13 is... wait, I'm thinking." Although Kasher in print is not as funny as his hilarious standup routines, he writes with an imaginative flair and a razor-edge ferocity.
