Spending time as a child with an endless succession of friends, relatives, anarchist boarding schools, libertarian commune dwellers, socialist rebels, and born-again circus clowns, Oran Canfield grows up viewing the inconsistencies of the world with a wary eye. The son of Jack Canfield—the motivational speaker and creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, he is intensely self-conscious and reserved, but his life won’t seem to leave him alone; whether Oran’s teaching 200 eager self-help disciples to juggle (among them a woman with stumps for hands), dodging a series of wacky near-death experiences, delivering newspapers in satin pants on a unicycle, or experimenting with drugs in the back of a Mexican cop car at age thirteen, one thing’s for sure: his life is much stranger than fiction.

Eventually he finds some fleeting comfort in heroin, but the world proves as dizzying sober as it is stoned: Playing drums in fringe bands and bouncing from rehab to rehab, he encounters a host of weird characters along the way—a devotee of obscure noise music who makes his own sunglasses out of cardboard, hooligan hockey players left in charge of group therapy, and the aggressive chess nerd who just might be in the mob. Feeding a dope addiction that becomes more harrowing by the day, Oran will sell off every possession and burn every bridge on the road to recovery. With humor and wit, Long Past Stopping grapples with the paradoxes of a mad world and shows that feel-good nostrums only go so far. Sometimes the only way out is the hard one.