I enjoyed reading about this point in Gantos’ life. He realizes that before prison, he always felt that he had no inspiration for writing when it was really all around him if he hadn’t been trying to avoid or forget events happening in his life with drugs. In prison, Gantos witnesses things that encourage him to write more. He was sentenced to sixty days to six years. Once they arrived in New York, they sold and delivered the hash until the FBI caught up with them. He thought about college tuition and agreed to the expedition.

Rik offered Gantos a job helping sail two thousand pounds of hash from St. He started working in a grocery store and a customer, Rik, wanted a box made with a hidden compartment. He still was certain that he would never end up in prison. I wasn’t a rapist.” However, he still confusion, like he had an urge to not be himself. “As I watched the prisoners being marched away I knew there was nothing we had in common,” he writes. Gantos didn’t take it too seriously, since he was certain he would not become a criminal or prisoner, but a writer. One afternoon at his school, four prisoners came to address the students.

He began to read and write more, and he developed new ways to learn, improve, and generate ideas. He returned to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and reenrolled as a senior at his old high school, even though he never finished the eleventh grade. After a while he decided to get his high school diploma. His job paid good money and he lived in a hotel. San Juan since he didn’t speak Spanish and his family didn’t have the money for private school, so they decided it would be best for him to work. His father had switched jobs often, so he was used to moving around and excited about it. In his junior year of high school, Gantos’ family had moved from Florida to Puerto Rico. My entire year was a grand balancing act between doing what I wanted and doing what I should, and being who I was while inventing who I wanted to be: a writer with something important to say.” “I was nineteen, still stuck in high school, and I wasn’t living at home. He reflects his life before and during his imprisonment and how it got him to where he is now. While in prison, Gantos decides he must change his life for the better. He and his partners sold the drug until they were caught and eventually landed in prison. In high school, he was searching for ideas, colleges and money when he agreed to sail a boat loaded with hashish to New York City. In his memoir Hole in my Life, Jack Gantos shares how, since he was a child he wanted to become a writer.

“I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.”

Hole in my life by jack gantos