New Memoir Explores Belief, Breakdown, and the Long Road to Adulthood

Newly Released Life and How to Live It: Near Wild Heaven continues Chaz Holesworth’s memoir with an unfiltered look at early adulthood after fundamentalism.

PHILADELPHIA, PA, UNITED STATES, January 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- In newly released Life and How to Live It: Near Wild Heaven, author Chaz Holesworth continues his unflinching memoir with a raw account of young adulthood in the years following his emotional collapse and expulsion from a fundamentalist Christian school. Covering the period from 1995 to 2000, the second volume traces a young man’s attempt to reclaim agency, identity, and meaning after everything familiar has been stripped away.

Picking up immediately after the events of Volume One, Near Wild Heaven finds Holesworth thrust into what he calls the “big, bad, secular world,” cut off from his girlfriend, alienated from religious authority, and left to navigate life without a roadmap. The result is a deeply personal chronicle of dislocation, survival, and slow evolution, marked by poverty, near-homelessness, reckless freedom, and moments of hard-earned clarity.

A Reader Views review calls the book “a powerful portrait of a young man forging his own identity,” noting that Holesworth chooses “truth over dogma, true friendship over conformity, and salvation in art.” The review highlights how music—particularly the work of R.E.M.—becomes an alternative moral compass, offering stability and meaning when traditional belief systems fail.

Rather than offering easy answers or tidy redemption, Near Wild Heaven documents the messiness of becoming an adult without institutional support. Holesworth writes candidly about emotional numbness, fear, and self-destructive behavior, but also about loyalty, love, humor, and the moments that quietly keep a person alive long enough to change.

Life and How to Live It: Near Wild Heaven does not attack faith, but it questions what happens when belief is enforced through shame and exclusion. It is a book about persistence—about staying upright long enough to outgrow the frameworks that once defined you.

This second volume deepens the memoir’s central theme: that identity is not granted by institutions, families, or belief systems, but built through endurance, self-reflection, and the courage to think independently.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chaz Holesworth is a Philadelphia native whose writing is shaped by the city’s grit, contradictions, and resilience. Raised amid poverty, addiction, and religious fundamentalism, he draws from lived experience to tell stories that resist sentimentality and easy conclusions. Now living in the suburbs of Philadelphia with his wife and dog, Holesworth remains deeply connected to music, social justice, and storytelling rooted in honesty rather than nostalgia.

AVAILABILITY & FURTHER INFORMATION

Life and How to Live It: Volume Two: Near Wild Heaven (ISBN: 979-8994241103, Independently Published January 5, 2026) is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major retailers.

For more information about Chaz Holesworth and his works, visit https://chazholesworthbooks.com/

For media requests and author interviews, contact Chaz Holesworth at chazrem@gmail.com

Chaz Holesworth
Author
chazrem@gmail.com
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