A Long Time Ago: Growing up with and out of Star Wars

"A Long Time Ago is a thoughtful, funny, and beautifully written story... scathingly hilarious and bang on.... rewards the reader with an echo of the excitement, disappointment, anger, delight, and, ultimately, love, that Van Ert feels for the franchise." - Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"A Long Time Ago is a wonderful look back on growing up with Star Wars...Van Ert [has] written a great little memoir about life as a boy with Star Wars and his trials as an adult with his boyhood fascination." - Wired.com

Some time in the summer of 1977, sitting in the back seat of a borrowed station wagon at the only drive-in in town, Gib van Ert saw the first ninety minutes of a film that changed his world-and the world in general-forever. Then he fell asleep. So began a torrid thirty-five-year love affair with Star Wars, complete with infatuation, lust, devotion, jealousy, betrayal, despair, separation and reconciliation.

In A Long Time Ago: Growing Up With And Out Of Star Wars, van Ert describes how Star Wars captivated his imagination as a boy, broke his heart as a young man, and is foisting itself upon him again today through fatherhood. At once a personal memoir and a reflection on the shared experience of a generation, A Long Time Ago explores Star Wars fandom with equal parts humour and thoughtfulness, nostalgia and regret.