Easy to Slip

Sam Kovner reads messages on walls and hears voices in the hall, and wonders: if you find yourself losing your mind, how do you get well?

Winter, 1976, Columbia University. Hearing voices and seeing hateful writing on walls, early admission Sam Kovner walks the New York streets, sleepless thirty-six hours. Through the radiant specificity of memory, he reckons with a hard-driving father, a caring, sometimes careless mother, a generous, self-involved uncle who’s just become a movie star, and star-struck grandparents. Sam fears the undertow of feelings: he’s not quite spent the night with someone he’s fallen for. Home for high-school graduation, a prom night affair reminds Sam of how he once knew love, freeing him to face his encroaching psychosis. Entering a hospital, he confronts traumatic, repressed memories with unflinching courage. With irrepressible humor and pathos, Easy to Slip recalls an era when youth mattered and people healed from psychiatric illness.

Cal Hoffman is a writer, educator and actor. He graduated from Catholic University and attended Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the MFA Fiction Writing Program at Columbia University. He has taught English and creative writing to children of immigrants, private school students, and young people in foster care. As an actor, he has performed in regional theater across the country and starred in the acclaimed New York revival of Jules Feiffer’s “Elliot Loves.” Cal lives with his wife, Victoria Leacock Hoffman, and their son, Harry, in Washington, DC.

"An uncle's sudden stardom has unforeseen effects on his nephew's family. As his celebrity soars, an impressionable boy must grapple with new definitions of success and an unbearable pressure to be special. When he arrives at college in the gritty New York of the 1970s, his mind is overrun by malevolent voices and visions. Raw, brave, and gripping, Easy to Slip is an uncommon exploration of adolescence, psychosis, and recovery." —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March

"Intricate, hallucinatory, funny and harrowing, Cal Hoffman's absorbing novel takes us deep into the psyche of an exceptional everyman, whose coming-of-age is at once singular and universal." —David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Proof

"With prose that is granularly precise and almost unnervingly intimate, Cal Hoffman's Easy to Slip draws us deep inside the mind of a young man as he struggles against psychosis. Hoffman renders his characters' experience with such visceral honesty that a reader cannot help but feel the terrible cost of the battle and the triumph of the hard-won victory." —Marisa Silver, author of The Mysteries

"With the veracity of a diarist, Cal Hoffman uses vivid stream-of-consciousness prose to dramatize the story of a precocious young Columbia student doing his very damnedest to stay on the right side of sanity. It's a story that touches the heart and the mind in equal measure." —Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife