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The River Less Run Down Home Press "If I could liken life to one thing in this world," writes Tim McLaurin, "I would choose a river." But rivers, a hard life has taught him, "are all illusions." Nearly a decade after his highly acclaimed and popular memoir, Keeper of the Moon, McLaurin returns to that genre to record a year at mid-life, a year with many rivers to be tamed, a year that will take an unexpected twist at the end, tossing him back into the whirlpool of hospitals, radiation and chemotherapy, battling again for his life against the cancer he had defeated ten years earlier. The highlight of this year was to be a long-planned trip westward in a Winnebago to take his mother to see the Rocky Mountains. With them are his children, Meghan and Christopher, his brother, Bruce, whose very marrow now fills his bones, and his brother-in-law, Donnie. As the group travels westward, his mother weighing down the Winnebago with souvenir rocks, McLaurin reflects on the journeys he has taken, the rivers he has run, to reach this juncture—his divorce, his relationships with women, his grueling bouts with alcoholism, his writing, and most importantly, his family, especially his children. It becomes a journey of discovery, opening his mind "deep and blazing like the throat of a morning glory" to the most important facet of life.
Reviews “Severe, weathered and sculpted, Tim McLaurin’s prose flows like a stream over bright pebbles and reminds other writers how beautiful an English sentence can be when crafted by the best of us. He lays out his life for our inspection and takes us on a journey of the deepest, most thrilling meditation.” “The story of one brave man’s journey deep into himself as he confronts divorce, alcoholism, his own wild past, his identity and heritage. A memorable and moving book.” “Hard, honest, sometimes funny, Tim McLaurin opens a vein and bleeds out his book. It will make you do what few books do—both question and better love your own life.” “A powerhouse! A book of fear and dreaming, regret and acceptance, constant awakening and redemption. Tim McLaurin achieves a miraculous wisdom, writing so close to the heart that he opens it to show us ourselves.” “An intimate book as raw, mesmerizing and indelibly inked in flesh and blood as a brand-new tattoo. McLaurin is an existential hero worthy of Sartre or Camus, authentic in a time of inauthenticity, real in a surreal age. He makes Ernest Hemingway look like a wuss, but writes with the lyrical grace and gentle sensibility of Virginia Woolf.”
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