Interview with Chaz Holesworth, Author of Life and How to Live it: Near Wild Heaven

I started writing my memoir series in 2019 after I watched my sister, who was battling cancer, pass away in hospice care. She had an aggressive form of cancer that was diagnosed in February and took her at the age of 45 just four months later. I made it to her deathbed with just minutes to spare to see her gasping for breath and then passing on. It was something that took a toll on me. I had a moment of clarity that night while drowning my sorrows in some beers and knew I had to get my and my sister’s story of our rough childhoods out there.

We grew up in some unique circumstances. We were born into poverty due to the actions of our parents. Our father had been a heroin addict since he was 17, which led to our financial situation, and our mother, who dropped out of high school in the 10th grade in the 1960s, married my father, knowing he was a drug addict and had two kids with him anyway. This led to our family living in a rough, poverty-filled section of our home city of Philadelphia called Kensington for most of our childhoods and teen years. We had drug dealers and gangs on most corners, and violent crime was a bit of the norm for me growing up.

With all that going on, my mom, who was in over her head with my dad’s actions and living in such rotten conditions, found comfort in the evangelical born-again Christian faith and dragged my sister into her faith, which demanded conformity and cut us off from secular things like music and most TV and movies that didn’t glorify Jesus. I experienced both extremes in my upbringing, and it left me at a disadvantage trying to navigate life when I got old enough to leave the faith I was raised in and enter the big, bad world with no money and a horrible education from all the years of born-again Christian schooling I had. It was basically like being homeschooled, but in church instead.

The two things that saved me, or helped me through my darkest hours, were the friends I made who were like family and my love of popular music of the time, especially the music of the bands R.E.M. and Tori Amos. I published the first installment of my memoir in 2024, Life and How to Live It: Begin the Begin, and at the end of that one is how I left the Christian church behind at the age of 17 to fend for myself after a mental health breakdown. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was going through PTSD after a life of chaos.

This volume is called Life and How to Live It: Near Wild Heaven, and it picks up right where the first ended. This one is more about how I was dealing with the mental anguish from life and trying to find myself again. It is full of stories of the times I tried to make sense of life, survive, and keep joy and hope alive. In the meantime, I experience some good moments, like seeing R.E.M. live for the first time and falling into teenage love, but also some horrendous times when I meet people who are toxic, leave mental scars on me, and bring on more demons.

This one is set in the years 1995 and 1996, when the events took place. It ends on a cliffhanger moment of my life, much like the first one did, which will be continued in the next installment that is being edited as we speak.