Long Past Stopping: A Memoir

Oran Canfield—son of self-help guru and Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield—tells his surreal story of growing up in Long Past Stopping. In this remarkable memoir, writing with a wry and cutting edge, Canfield relates tales of a childhood in flux—being buffeted about among family friends, relatives, rebels, and born-again circus clowns, in an anarchist private school, communes, and libertarian enclaves—and of a young adulthood spent among the ruins of heroin addiction. Long Past Stopping is Oran Canfield’s often hilariously harrowing tale of surviving life in the strange lane.

Juggled between an endless succession of friends, relatives, anarchist boarding schools, libertarian commune dwellers, socialist rebels, and born-again circus clowns, Oran Canfield grew up viewing the inconsistencies of the world with a wary eye. The son of Jack Canfield—the motivational speaker and creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul—Oran is intensely self-conscious and reserved, but his life can't seem to leave him alone. Whether he's teaching two hundred eager self-help disciples to juggle (among them a woman with stumps for hands), dodging a series of wacky near-death experiences, delivering newspapers in satin pants on a unicycle, or experimenting with drugs in the back of a Mexican cop car at age thirteen, one thing's for sure: Oran's life is much stranger than fiction.

With mordant wit, Long Past Stopping grapples with the paradoxes of a mad world and shows that feel-good nostrums go only so far. Sometimes the only way out is the hard way.

“Thank god Oran Canfield came out of this alive and thank double-god he emerged with his sense of humor. So many weirdball characters and harrowing situations that you’d be hard-pressed to make up better ones. This is the kind of life story that begs to be told.” - Beth Lisick author of Helping Me Help Myself

“Memoirs about dysfunctional families can be funny, and this book is hilarious… [Canfield] delivers newspapers on a unicycle, wins third place in a juggling competition and experiments with drugs in a Mexican police cruiser. His descriptions are snappy and his side commentary…[makes] you laugh out loud.” - Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

“The son of Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield debuts with a memoir of a peripatetic West Coast childhood and subsequent struggle with drug addiction, told in a series of humorous vignettes… The author’s deadpan irony is…brilliant…” - Kirkus Reviews

“An oddly compelling and appealing account of a life truly stranger than fiction.” - Booklist