Going Away: A Report, a Memoir

by Clancy Sigal

National Book Award This autobiographical road-trip novel exploring life and politics in the 1950s became “an underground bestseller” ( The Village Voice ).  The year is 1956, and a blacklisted Hollywood agent sets off on a cross-country adventure from Los Angeles to New York City. Along the way—stopping at bars, all-night restaurants, and gas stations—the twenty-nine-year-old narrator, at once egotistical and compassionate, barrels across the “blue highways” to meet, fight with, love, and hate old comrades and girlfriends, collecting their stories and reflecting on his own life experiences.
Driven by probing stream-of-consciousness prose and brutally honest self-analysis, Going Away is a sprawling autobiographical journey into a kaleidoscope of American mindsets; most significantly, that of its radical narrator. Crammed with acute social and political observations, this urgent novel captures the spirit of its times, so remarkably like that of today.
An odyssey in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road , Going Away is “a novel of major importance. There hasn’t been anything like it since The Grapes of Wrath ” ( San Francisco Chronicle ).
 

513 pages, ebook

Published August 6, 2013

About the author

Clancy Sigal was the child of a love affair between two idealists. His parents Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal were labor organizers. Jennie, a single mother, raised Clancy on her own. Chicago-born, he was an ordinary street kid until the army sent him overseas. He attended the Nuremberg war crimes trial, and then enrolled at UCLA where his classmates included the later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Blacklisted by a movie studio, and chased by the FBI, he lucked into a job as a Hollywood talent agent for clients like Humphrey Bogart. He slipped into Great Britain as an illegal immigrant and had a years-long affair with the writer Doris Lessing. Intending only a tourist weekend, he stayed in London for 30 years where, as well as broadcasting for BBC, he collaborated with the ‘anti psychiatrist’ R.D. Laing in the care and feeding of “incurable” schizophrenics. Relocating to Hollywood, he co-wrote “Frida” (Kahlo) and the Hemingway love story “In Love and War”.