Bruce Spang
Author of No Way Back: A Young Man's Search for Home, the current Hunt Down We Read selection.
The book, and why we chose it
Bruce Parkinson Spang traces his early life as Jason, a young man caught between who he is, who he is expected to be, and the violent shifts reshaping America. What he finds is a country on fire: civil rights battles, antiwar protests, an awakening community fighting for justice, and transformative work in the Appalachian mountains.
Through encounters with courageous activists, fellow seekers, mountain families, and the dispossessed of Nashville, Jason confronts his own fears, desires, and illusions. HDWR selected the memoir because it asks readers to weigh identity, belonging, and moral responsibility against a world that refuses to stand still.
External book listingPassages readers return to
No Way Back is a powerful coming-of-age memoir set against the upheavals of the late 1960s.
Leaving behind a privileged but emotionally fraught Midwestern home, Jason enters Vanderbilt Divinity School seeking distance, purpose, and a place to belong.
Stripped of familiar props - family expectations, privilege, and even certainty - he is forced to navigate identity, faith, sexuality, and moral responsibility in a world unwilling to stand still.
This is the intimate, reflective journey of a young man learning that finding home begins with finding himself.
The HDWR interview
These are the questions our readers put forward for this cycle. Answers are published here as they are received, and members can add further questions in the reader forum.
Jason is both you and not quite you. How did naming him change what you were able to write?
Readers keep returning to the distance the third name creates between memory and confession.
Divinity school was meant to be a refuge. When did you first understand it would not be?
The move from shelter to exposure is where the memoir's tension begins.
What did the Appalachian mountain families teach you that Nashville could not?
The book sets organised protest beside quiet, practical endurance.
How did you decide what to withhold about faith and sexuality?
Restraint carries a great deal of the book's moral weight.
Looking back, what does home mean to you now that it did not mean to Jason?
The closing question of every HDWR discussion cycle for this title.
Spotlight reading list
- No Way Back: A Young Man's Search for Home
The current HDWR selection. Read first, in order, before the companion titles.
- Chapter-by-chapter community prompts
Guided questions on identity, belonging, faith, justice, and moral responsibility.
Open - Discussion questions library
Memoir and coming-of-age questions to bring to your own reading group.
Open