One often thinks that bestselling fiction writers live their lives apart from reality cranking out novels that touch hearts and souls while never having experienced the traumas of their very real characters. But that premise makes no sense, and is certainly dispelled with this touching memoir of Nicholas Sparks and his family. You see the roots of most of his early novels in the traumas he survived. It's a testament to his talent as a writer that he can so flawlessly tuck real life angst and people into a totally different setting and circumstance and make them valid and real. While the trip he and his brother took may have geographically been "the trip of a lifetime", the trip they took back through their individual and collective pain made order from the disorder and was in itself the true trip. I was brought to tears in many places by the honestly expressed grief and touched by the way two tough little boys grew up to be men who were strong enough to allow themselves to cry.
