{"product_id":"9781631492884","title":"Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions: Dispatches from the Working Class","description":"\u003cp\u003eWeaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk’s \u003cem\u003eFight Club\u003c\/em\u003e with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s \u003cem\u003eNickel and Dimed\u003c\/em\u003e, J. R. Helton brings to life an obscured, all-too-often ignored slice of the American psyche in this unflinching memoir of blue-collar Texas.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn the 1980s, somewhere in Austin, Helton was young, married, and jobless. After a few strung-out years trying to make it as a writer, he was caught in a cycle of drunken, coked-up nights, crashing on friends’ couches and looking for money in the morning. Succumbing to the daunting reality of what it means to support both himself and a troubled marriage, he became a housepainter. He sold pumpkins on the side of the road, delivered firewood, ran a crew of illegal immigrants hauling railroad ties across the empty plains of Kansas, and then he painted even more.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDespair is transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual labor. Along the way, the people toiling beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years are brought to vivid life: the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and the racists, as well as Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paintbrush and deadbeat fathers straining to pay child support.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWith intoxicating, blasé-faire sentiment, Helton shows that everyone—from the beauties at the rodeo to the lowest laborers—is tethered by a common desire to just pay the bills and balm the loneliness. A raw and moving account, \u003cem\u003eBad Jobs and Poor Decisions\u003c\/em\u003e captures a microcosm of left-behind America that straddles a dangerous line between ruin and redemption.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Liveright Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47136374587632,"sku":"9781631492884","price":22.73,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781631492884_p0.jpg?v=1763672147","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781631492884","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}