Events
Author Event at Bear Pond Books ft. André J. de Saint Phalle
Join Bear Pond Books in Stowe, Vermont for an author event on May23rd from 1pm to 3pm celebrating André J. de Saint Phalle's latest book, The Spaces Between: Thumb Out.
About the Book:
That summer I was twenty-one and everything was collapsing.
My parents were divorcing. The twenty-five-acre farm was being sold. I'd dropped out of college, been disinherited, and had nowhere left to run except the road itself. I "borrowed" eighty dollars from my mother's closet and stuck out my thumb.
Twenty-eight chapters trace the full arc. The first act looks back four years before the road — to the forces that put a young man on the highway: the family coming apart, the institutions pointing him somewhere he didn't want to go, the slow realization that the only exit available was the interstate itself.
Then the road itself, in real time. Seven thousand miles in seventy-two days during the summer of 1973. Peyote shared with a woman who talks to giant redwoods. Jerry Garcia plays my guitar and tells me to let it guide me. UFOs off Big Sur. A friend lost to his own dark prophecy. A vision in a desert canyon that changes everything.
And then the long look back at what came after. The road was over but the motion wasn't. It took seven more years — through false starts, dead ends, and one long lost decade — before I finally stopped running and built a life that actually belonged to me.
At the center of everything is the relationship that shaped it all: a father who believed a son could accomplish anything if designed carefully enough, and a son who spent a decade learning that the life worth having was the one nobody had planned.
This is the complete story of a young man in motion — what launched him, what the road gave him, and what it finally cost him to stop.
About the Author:
André J. de Saint Phalle (b. 1952) represents a unique voice in contemporary American memoir — a man born into French nobility who, at twenty-one, walked away from everything familiar and hitchhiked across America. He has lived his life like a surfer ever since, looking for the best wave in each set and getting a few good rides. This volume is the first book in his memoir series, The Spaces Between.
