Review of "Life and How to Live It- Volume One: Begin the Begin" by Chaz Holesworth

​Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

Life and How to Live It- Volume One: Begin the Begin is a brutally candid coming-of-age memoir by Chaz Holesworth, covering his life from his 1978 birth through a personal collapse at age seventeen in 1995. Despite the title, this is not a self-help book. It is the story of a kid trying to survive poverty, addiction, family instability, religious control, shame, grief, and the belief that he may never get out.

Chaz grows up in Kensington, Philadelphia, with a father whose long-term heroin addiction devastates the household and a mother who, desperate for safety and meaning, embraces an extremely strict fundamentalist church. The family lives with severe neglect and deprivation, while Chaz also endures bullying, childhood boundary violations, fear, and a church-school environment that teaches him to distrust his own thoughts, emotions, interests, and identity. It should also be mentioned that this can be considered an LGBTQ+ memoir, if that's something that interests you.

Music becomes his lifeline. R.E.M., Tori Amos, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, and the alternative-rock world give him a vocabulary for feelings that religion and family life have made him afraid to express. Discovering R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” is especially important because it begins to crack open the narrow world he has been given. The songs, records, concerts, friendships, and eventually romantic relationships become evidence that there may be another way to live.

As a teenager, he starts working, gains access to music and friends, runs away from home, and eventually moves in with his grandmother. For a while, Bensalem Baptist Academy and his relationship with Laura offer a fragile hope that he can finish school, be loved, and build a future. But the school expels him, Laura’s parents force them apart, and he is pushed back toward the restrictive church-school system he had tried to escape. The book ends with another expulsion, a confrontation with his father, a serious emotional breakdown, and Chaz stepping into an uncertain secular life without the structure that had controlled him.

This is actually the second book by Chaz Holesworth we've read. In fact, we read this series out of order (because that's the order they were submitted in). Gosh, we wish we would've read this one first! It provides a lot of context to what happened in book 2. It's also a bit more focused on the author's relationships with people, particularly family members and love interests, which we really enjoyed and appreciated.

This is a powerful memoir because it feels lived-in rather than cleaned up for the reader’s comfort. Chaz does not present himself as a hero who always makes the right choice. He is funny, angry, insecure, romantic, immature, perceptive, and often painfully honest about his own mistakes. That makes the book feel human.

The strongest part is how it shows that poverty, addiction, religious fear, inadequate education, family trauma, and mental health struggles do not exist separately. They pile on each other. His father is not reduced to a monster, and his mother is not reduced to a villain. Both clearly hurt him, but the book also makes it clear that both were damaged people trying, and often failing, to survive their own lives.

Music is also much more than decoration here. R.E.M. is practically a character in the memoir. The album commentary occasionally slows the pacing, especially for readers who are not deeply invested in 1980s and 1990s alternative music, but it also explains how Chaz stayed alive emotionally. Music gives him language, community, rebellion, comfort, and a path toward becoming someone outside the identity imposed on him.

Now, in the previous book (or the sequel, if we're getting technical), music, musicians, and bands absolutely dominated almost every aspect of Chaz's life. It always seemed to be on his mind, to an obsessive degree. In fact, a lot of the second book seemed overly fixated on music and a distaste for organized religion, particularly Christianity. However, what's great about this book is that it provides a ton of context to that. It also provides a bit of relief and an escape from all of that.

We now have a better understanding of why the author viewed organized religion with so much disdain in the second book. He was severely mistreated, persecuted, manipulated, and filled with shame and guilt by the terrible religious people and institutions he encountered. There's actually a lot of irony in this book and the life of the author. Perhaps the biggest example of this is how his father suffered from a long-term heroin addiction and heavy alcohol use—things which society and organized religion generally view as negative. They are, indeed, negative. However, it's interesting and ironic how Chaz's father actually seems like the normal one (the normal parent) in the family. That’s because his mother’s obsessive religiosity became so all-consuming that it often made her appear less grounded than Chaz’s deeply addicted father. His father’s problems were obvious: heroin, alcohol, instability, absence, and poor decisions. But his mother’s damage came packaged as righteousness, protection, salvation, and “God’s will.”

She became so consumed by the church’s teachings that normal childhood experiences, secular music, movies, friendships, dating, questioning, self-expression, and eventually Chaz’s own independence could all be treated as threats to his soul. Rather than helping him process fear, trauma, insecurity, or abuse, the religious environment often filled him with more shame, guilt, and terror about Hell. His father was dangerously flawed, but he could still offer Chaz moments of ordinary life, freedom, humor, music, movies, and connection. His mother, meanwhile, increasingly allowed doctrine and fear to shape nearly every part of her son’s world.

That does not make Chaz’s father a good parent. It makes the situation even sadder. The parent society would most quickly condemn, the addicted father, could sometimes seem more normal than the parent who believed she was saving her child.

Some of the moments Chaz has with his dad are some of the best in the book. His dad was the only member of the family who actually attended his pageant. He and his dad bonded over watching Star Wars together. After a severe medical emergency which leaves his father disoriented and unable to answer basic questions, his father is still able to say, "That's my son, Charlie" (the only question he got right).

Look, many of us at OCA are Christian or come from an Abrahamic religious background. We're so sorry to the author for the terrible things that supposedly-religious people did to him. That's not the way Christians are supposed to be. That's not the way Christianity is supposed to work. The author actually does a good job pointing this out, alluding to how Jesus taught us to be loving and accepting—"Judge not, that ye be not judged."

While the criticisms of religion in this book made us feel uncomfortable or were even upsetting to us, they still seem justified given the context of what Chaz experienced. We can't hold that against him. He has the right to say that a group of people were terrible to him, so he doesn't want to be like them (or one of them).

Chaz also described rich moments with other people in his life like his sister, Cathy, the "queen of mean." Chaz refers to her as the "lightweight champion" of people who make drama in the household (his parents are the "heavyweights").

Aside from his complicated relationship with his father, some of Chaz’s most memorable and revealing connections are with the young women who enter his life. Tonya, Christine, Jeanne, Laura, Mary, and Sue each bring out a different side of him: the awkward romantic, the deeply insecure dreamer, the loyal friend, the sensitive music obsessive, and the teenager who wants love so badly that he can sometimes overwhelm himself with hope.

Christine is especially interesting because their relationship does not settle into a simple romance. After a brief courtship, they become close friends who tease, argue, exchange gifts, explore Philadelphia, and help each other through difficult moments. Their bond becomes especially moving when Chaz stays beside Christine during her father’s final days, even singing “Hero” with her at his bedside. In many ways, Christine becomes less a girlfriend than a sister-like presence and one of the few people with whom Chaz can be emotionally open.

Jeanne, the “Boardwalk Queen,” represents the rush of first serious love. Their Wildwood romance, long phone calls, mix tapes, and Chaz’s exhausting bus trip to Pearl River give the memoir some of its sweetest and most wistful material. Laura, meanwhile, becomes perhaps the book’s most developed romantic relationship. She seems to offer Chaz a real possibility of tenderness, mutual understanding, education, and a future beyond Kensington. Even their happiness is threatened by the controlling religious environment around them, which makes their relationship feel both hopeful and fragile.

These relationships matter because they show that Chaz is not only reacting against pain. He is actively searching for connection, affection, and someone who might see value in him when he has spent most of his life being made to feel ashamed, unwanted, or trapped.

Chaz also has some beautiful moments with random strangers. For example, during a concert, someone sprays mace into the crowd, causing Chaz great pain and partially blinding him. He finds comfort in a random female concertgoer to holds his face and reassures him that it will be ok.

There's another irony we found with this book: clearly, music, concerts, and bands are an escape for the author from the more stressful things in his life. However, from a reader's perspective, the stressful things in his life, and the many relationships he has with family members and others, are an escape for us.

There was another part of this book that really caught our attention: when Chaz was nearly scammed into entering his book into a poetry anthology. What's ironic is we think we know the anthology he was talking about. We think it was called something like "Stars in Our Hearts" and it required all entrants to be willing to buy it and tell their loved ones to buy it at an exorbitant price.

Lastly, this book is strangely funny in a uniquely Chaz-ish way. For example, he says, "I swear to God, to Michael Stipe, I swear on my life and soul… " instead of just swearing to God like most people do.

He says, “One of the groups of kids had a gang named WTO which meant Whites Take Over. Yet even with such a family-friendly name, they still chased two white kids from the other side of the El away.” We just found "with such a family-friendly name" to be such a snarky way of saying things.

Check it out on Amazon!