You Never Know What You're Hauling

From actor Donal Logue—known for Gotham, Grounded for Life, Sons of Anarchy, and his award-winning performance in The Tao of Steve, as well as the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Trejo—comes a sweeping, poignant memoir of Hollywood, the open road, and an unlikely search for peace in the Oregon woods.

In 2003, at the height of a successful acting career in film and television, Logue bought a cabin on 148 acres in southern Oregon. He imagined a refuge: a place to raise his two young sons, work with his hands, and build a life closer to the ideals of Thoreau and Emerson than to the churn of Hollywood. Instead, he found himself trying to juggle several unruly lives at once. 

Between movie sets and television shoots, Logue got his commercial driver’s license, drove eighteen-wheelers, started trucking and hardwood businesses, learned to log and woodwork, and raised two boys as a single father. But beneath the adventure and absurdity were harder realities: addiction, mental illness, grief, and the painful discovery that devotion and hard work cannot always save the people we love. 

Moving from the Mexican border of his childhood and his family’s Irish roots to Hollywood, New York, and the open road, Logue’s story returns again and again to the woods of southern Oregon, its spiritual center and the place against which he measures the rest of his life. There, with more determination than expertise, he learns the satisfaction of labor, the pleasures of making and fixing things, and the limits of the self-reliance he once idealized.

You Never Know What You’re Hauling is a memoir about work, family, ambition, and the strange, sometimes comic, sometimes devastating distance between the life we imagine and the one we are asked to live.