Returning: A Spiritual Journey [Paperback]

Dan Wakefield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1997

Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating in alcohol, depression, and isolation. He fled Hollywood for Boston where he reclaimed a faith he had thought he was too sophisticated to embrace. In this moving memoir, Wakefield returns to his religious roots and his early life: his Indiana boyhood, his tumultuous student days, and his growth as a writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At age 48, Wakefield awoke screaming in panic. He fled from Hollywood to Boston in search of treatment for stress, and later for a deeper malady: spiritual emptiness. "Eloquently, he re-creates his initial steps in regaining his religious faith," commented PW , finding this a "compelling testament." Author tour.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Memories of abandoned childhood faith and the gracious aid of mentors (Mark Van Doren, Robert Coles) illumine this account of writer Wakefield's spiritual pilgrimage from his boyhood in Indiana through teen-age agonies over acne and sex, immersion in atheistic Columbia University in the early 1950s, protracted analysis, and a depressing mix of alcohol and failed relationships even as his writing career flourished. Triggered by mid-life conversion and nurturance in Boston's King's Chapel, this narrative reflects obliquely on the ways God was really there all along, despite Wakefield's frantic resistance. A moving bookhonest, evocative, and insightful. EC
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (April 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807027111
• ISBN-13: 978-0807027110
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #640,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual comet, April 21, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Returning: A Spiritual Journey (Paperback)

I started reading this book while Comet Hale-Bopp was at its brightest. I quickly came to understand that journalist/novelist Dan Wakefield's journey was the spiritual version of a comet. He begins with a fairly typical midwest Christianity, then moves to agnosticism, then moves to atheism, then moves to attending a Unitarian church, within which he moves back into Christianity.

His journey, like that of a comet, took him far from his home, his roots, his faith, his God, to the cold and darkness that filled his life. But when the return journey began, like a comet, his life grew brighter as he came nearer to the faith that he found to be the center of his journey.

As he looks back, Dan Wakefield sees the ways that God has been with him throughout the long journey. Like the gravity that calls a distant comet to make its journey back toward the sun, so was God pulling on Wakefield. Reading the story of his return was more stimulating than watching Hale-Bopp on its journey.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An Exercise in Moderation, June 26, 2002

By 

Richard Wells (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Returning: A Spiritual Journey (Paperback)

Spiritual memoirs tend to follow the same plot line. It's the boy meets girl story with God substituted for the girl. There's nothing wrong with the formula, the author's job is to make it fresh and interesting. Dan Wakefield doesn't get the job done. The structure of "Returning" is linear, the pace is ponderous, and the insights only moderately interesting. In fact, the entire book is an exercise in moderation, written by a moderate talent, who, on the evidence presented, has lived a moderate life. It's no wonder Bill Moyer's, a paragon of moderation, liked this book. There are parts of this book where the author could have revealed more. The account of his nervous breakdown is scary, but all too brief, and on too many occasions - bouts of adolescent [activity], unsuccessful psychoanalysis, addiction to alcohol - Mr. Wakefield seems like a kid in a confessional. He rushes through his sins in order to be unburdened, but also undiscovered. It doesn't work. If we give the penitent the benefit of our attention, he should give us the benefit of a compelling story.

4.0 out of 5 stars Variations in Style, February 5, 2011

By 

Fulmoonmajik (Lexington, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Returning: A Spiritual Journey (Paperback)

Dan Wakefield's memoir "Returning: A Spiritual Journey" is a first person account of the narrator's search for emotional, intellectual and spiritual direction and recounts his physical, psychological and spiritual journey from childhood through mid-life. The first section begins with a crisis and the resulting struggle toward healing (physical and spiritual); the second longest section backtracks by explaining what led up to the crisis; and the third comes full circle as it reveals the healing (if not actually healed) narrator's growth and understanding of self and belonging. This account is not about "returning" in the traditional sense of "a going back to," although the narrator does make several actual journeys to places from his past. Instead, the reader comes to understand the series of life-choices that we all face, and how our own journeys consist of continuously turning and re-turning toward (or away from) those "paths." The narrator's anguished need to belong and to find meaning and a sense of security in his surroundings lead him through a tangled, frustrated, and at times destructive series of life-paths as he seeks guidance through religion, family, friendship, drugs and alcohol, prayer, psychoanalysis, travel, and literature. There are many literary devices worth discussing in this memoir; however, Wakefield's use of various stylistic modes is evidence of some of his best writing.
Although "Returning" is written primarily in a reportorial style, there are at least four scenes wherein Wakefield completely changes his style, totally immersing himself in the moment to create a complete experience for the reader. The first of these is in Part I when the narrator has awoken from one of his famous hangovers. Wakefield seems almost to play with words in this brief passage, the rough, pounding tone mimicking the throbbing hangover headache: "Me. Boston. Beacon Hill. My friend's living-room couch. Ouch" (11).
The second major shift in style occurs when the narrator is fishing from a boat on the Sea of Galilee. Wakefield's hauntingly lovely prose conveys the mysticism of this experience as being so much more than merely catching fish. Throughout this passage, there is a hush, a feeling of awe and spirituality that the reader can vicariously experience "as the night took on an ancient aura" (137).
Wakefield's wordplay takes on an entirely different tone during the traumatic impotency scene, wherein the similarity to the Molly Bloom soliloquy in "Ulysses" would be obvious to any reader of Joyce, even without its in-text reference. What makes this passage genius is not just that the technique is used but in the way it is used: not to indicate affirmation but the hope of affirmation that is ultimately dashed: "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, oh, essence of yes, but I said no. No? No. That can't be true...Listen again, I know I said yes, I must have said yes. Yes! I can hear it now. Yes! But that was only my mouth..." (151).
The gravesite scene in Part III, which recounts the narrator's first visit to the cemetery where his parents are buried, utilizes still another radical departure from the book's overall style. Tension builds within the reader as the narrator seems to have been dropped in the middle of a Gothic novel. He feels the angry presence of the dead through the icy air, he scrambles through the snow to his car...and the car won't start. This passage goes far beyond simply relating the details; through the writer's abrupt shift in style, we are plunged into the same kind of panic experienced by the narrator: "The key wouldn't turn. It wouldn't budge. Not at all" (216).
Despite the fairly typical structure of Dan Wakefield's memoir, much of its appeal lies in the author's variations in style and use of language and wordplay. This book is beautifully written, its hauntingly spiritual passages evidence of an experienced and creative hand.