To Say Nothing: A Diary of Memory (Volume 1)

VOLUME 1 of TO SAY NOTHING is an easygoing account of the early life of a Canadian baby-boom hippie-slacker covering the years 1968 through 1978. It's the hippie Bildungsgeschichte we’ve all been waiting for. There are breathtakingly dangerous childhood antics, the horrors of family and high school, and a darkly disturbing move to small-town Alberta. From there across Europe and the Middle East. In and out of college. Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and yoga. Intense but not always faithful loves, theatrical dramas, years of endless parties, a dozen jobs, dodging bullets in Mexico, good luck and bad, odd misadventures, and finally, epiphany and rehabilitation, ending with a tramp through the ashrams of California and, inevitably, a stumble along the Hippie Trail to Nepal and India. Join Neil as, in his own words, thousands of them, in his own unapologetic style, tight, direct, and mostly agenda-free (except for the Legalize Marijuana thing), he takes you gently and humorously by the hand down the path of a bright but confused and shiftless man, buggering around, allergic to work, searching for a life of ease and meaning. Anyone alive in the last half of the 20th century will find something to laugh about—or sneer at—in Neil’s adventures. And there's sexy stuff, too.

Born in 1953 in Southern Alberta, the second child of two and the only son of a truck driver and a housewife, Neil Hansen went on to accomplish almost nothing. How then, you ask, could he write a 2,000-page, four-volume memoir containing not a single boring paragraph? He lived his life on his own terms only occasionally sponging off friends and family. He cared not a jot for the judgments of others. He had some difficulty with drugs, alcohol, women, and authority, but overall, he was not an unlucky man. He studied at several schools, including the school of life, and when he encountered problems, he was never afraid to turn and walk away from them. Which usually led to more problems.