The Same River Twice
by Chris Offutt
From the paperback edition cover:
“A touching honest story of transformation. Chris Offutt, drifter, learns to navigate that metaphorical river that bears us ... if we’re lucky, toward meaningful work and the gift of love.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“The story of Mr. Offutt’s journey is so rich and fantastic and desperately honest that it could stand alone. But twined with the slower, lovely wanderings of a man confronting wild nature in the womb of his wife, The Same River Twice is as moving as the current he must cross and recross to find his way.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“In this memoir of the decade ... Chris Offutt picks up where Daniel Boone left off, thumbing his way out of Appalachia in search of new frontiers.”
—The New Yorker
“[Chris Offutt] is a potent new American writer with a beautiful voice.”
—Kim McLaurin, The Houston Post Book World
“Somewhere on the road ... Mr. Offutt learned to tell stories, which [he] does exquisitely ... rich and fantastic and desperately honest.”
—Sue Halpern, The New York Times Book Review
“[Offutt’s] journey is a classic.... In a world that is sometimes dangerous, usually depressing and perpetually grimy—also a world darkly humorous—one remembers his story as one of restoration and reconciliation, redemption and rebirth.”
—Brad Knickerbocker, The Christian Science Monitor
“His memoir marks the debut of a wonderful new talent.... Offutt has the sharpest eye and most potent style of the several talented writers to recently come out of coal country.”
—D.T. Max, New York Newsday
“Memorable ... [Offutt’s] tale should be looked at as the tale of a generation that came of age in the late ’70s.”
—Tim McLaurin, The Washington Post
“Offutt the diarist has no models. The Same River Twice is a wild original ... [displaying] the nihilistic passivity of a graduate student with the physical robustness of a convict.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“There sometimes creeps into the tone of memoirs a voice too sincere, too literal in intention, to capture the narrative freedom that fiction allows. But Chris Offutt finds an angle of entry that loosens things up ... [and] achieves an amazing closure.”
—Vince Passaro, Mirabella
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