Contemporary Authors

• No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2018

1. No way home : a memoir of life on the run LCCN 2017049579 Type of material Book Personal name Wetherall, Tyler, 1983- author. Main title No way home : a memoir of life on the run / Tyler Wetherall. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : St. Martin's Press, 2018. Description 305 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781250112194 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3623.E878 Z46 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Tyler Wetherall - http://www.tylerwetherall.com/about-2/

  Tyler Wetherall is an established freelance writer and editor with twelve years professional experience. Her journalism has appeared in a wide range of publications including The Guardian, The Brooklyn Magazine, and Vice, amongst others. She also teaches creative writing and journalism at Manhattanville College.

  Her short fiction has been included in journals such as The Gettysburg Review and Brooklyn Vol. 1, and she works as Deputy Editor for literary journal The Wrong Quarterly.

  Her writing is represented by Emma Parry at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, and No Way Home will be published by St. Martin's Press in 2018. She lives between London and New York, where she works from writer's membership space The Oracle Club.

  Photo by Sammy Deigh of C.A.N.V.A.S.®

• Daily Mail - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5574427/Growing-run-child-fugitive-drug-dealer-Woman-writes-youth-new-memoir.html

  Growing up on the lam: Drug smuggler's daughter reveals the reality of a childhood on the run - living in 13 houses in 5 countries by the time she was 10 and how authorities tracked her father down by following her to visit him in St Lucia aged 12
  Tyler Wetherall, 34, left the United States as a baby with her parents and two older siblings while authorities closed in on her pot smuggler father
  The family lived in various locations throughout Europe - often amongst other fugitive families - before settling in her model mother's native Britain
  As a child, Tyler was aware their lifestyle was unusual - but had no idea that her father was a wanted criminal
  Even after her father was imprisoned in California - eventually serving more than five years before his release - Tyler did not speak of his criminal past or sentence
  Tyler's British-born mother was afraid her children would be ostracized if people found out her father was behind bars
  Tyler's father, Benjamin Glaser, wrote his autobiography while imprisoned and wanted to turn it into a book
  Tyler tried her hand at ghostwriting but instead decided to turn the story into a memoir, No Way Home
  She and her father maintained a close relationship, even while he was in prison
  She says: 'If you wish for things to be different, that’s wishing yourself to be a different person – and I don’t wish for that'
  By SHEILA FLYNN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

  PUBLISHED: 10:40 EDT, 4 April 2018 | UPDATED: 19:31 EDT, 4 April 2018

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  Writer Tyler Wetherall was at a party in Brooklyn a few years ago, having a casual get-to-know-you chat with a new acquaintance, when something struck her as odd about his answers. He had traveled frequently as a child, but he was vague about the specifics as their conversation progressed. Tyler had a theory about why that might be, so she posed a jarring question to her new friend.

  ‘I looked at him [and] was like … “Was your father a drug smuggler?”’ Tyler tells DailyMail.com. ‘He said, “How did you know?”

  ‘I said, “You tell the same lies I tell people.”’

  She clarifies further: ‘It’s funny; you get switched onto it.’

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  Because Tyler, 34, spent most of her childhood on the run from American authorities, her New York-born father an international pot smuggler wanted by the FBI in the era of President Ronald Reagan’s strict crackdown on drugs. Rather than face a significant prison sentence, Tyler’s father, Benjamin Glaser, took the family abroad from their home in California, resettling Tyler, her sister and brother and their mother in fugitive enclaves from Italy and France to Portugal before they returned to her model mother’s native Britain.

  For much of this time, Tyler had no real idea why the family often went by different names, moved so frequently and had such an unconventional lifestyle. It wasn’t until her father was taken into custody – after authorities tracked her own trip to St Lucia to visit her dad for her twelfth birthday – that the extent of the truth came and out and Tyler was forced to confront the reality of her family situation.

  This was followed by years of traumatic visits to her father in a California prison, all while his ex-wife and children maintained a code of silence – worried that classmates and fellow residents of their new home in Bath, England would ostracize them if it was revealed that a convicted drug kingpin’s family was living among them.

  Tyler, left, with her father and older sister; he began selling marijuana in college and evolved into a major international drug smuggler +9
  Tyler, left, with her father and older sister; he began selling marijuana in college and evolved into a major international drug smuggler

  Tyler's British mother, a former model, poses in Maui with an infant Tyler, her sister and her brother, who is seven years older than the writer +9
  Tyler's British mother, a former model, poses in Maui with an infant Tyler, her sister and her brother, who is seven years older than the writer

  Tyler, who now lives in Brooklyn, initially tried to ghostwrite her father's story, then worked on the project as a novel, but ultimately turned the work into a memoir titled No Way Home +9
  Tyler, who now lives in Brooklyn, initially tried to ghostwrite her father's story, then worked on the project as a novel, but ultimately turned the work into a memoir titled No Way Home

  Tyler and her father maintained a strong bond during his imprisonment – closer, he would argue, than many fathers and daughters who saw each other every day – but there were issues of resentment and lost time that would have to be overcome. Tyler, who now lives in Brooklyn, and her father, who works as an investment adviser in Northern California, remain incredibly close to this day and talk a few times a week, visiting each other whenever they can.

  And working together on Tyler’s new book about their unorthodox and fugitive family life played a huge part in achieving that, she says.

  It started, however, as her father’s story; he wrote a massive autobiographical tome during his five-plus years in prison (he’d been sentenced to 10 years on charges related to running a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, after he and 17 others were indicted for smuggling 100 tons of marijuana worth nearly $500million from Thailand to the United States between 1976 and 1983.)

  Following his release in 2001, Glaser wanted to publish that project. He and Tyler had always dreamed of turning their unusual history into a film, but now he wanted a ghostwriter for a book.

  ‘I was working as a magazine journalist in London at the time, and I felt very strongly that I didn’t want anybody else to do it but me,’ Tyler tells DailyMail.com. ‘So I quit my job and flew out to LA and moved in with him; I think I interviewed him every day for six weeks.’

  In addition to hours of those interview tapes, Tyler also had the thousands of words he’d typed up behind bars.

  ‘I started trying to write his autobiography, but I couldn’t do it,’ she says. ‘In his version of the story, which is totally true for him, he is the grand adventurer and the hero of his story – and I felt like it was excluding our voices and what we went through, too. And it was starting to make me angry with him again, which I’d resolved.

  ‘I thought, I want to tell it through my words and my eyes. So I told him I was doing that. He was quite supportive of me all the way through, and I started working on it as a novel and, I think, wrote it as a novel because I wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet – because we never talked to anyone about it. Even a few years ago, I still hadn’t told most of my friends – so it took me a long time to come to terms with the idea of telling people this story and telling people it was true.

  ‘I realized I’d written a memoir.’

  She had great resources to help her; in addition to mining her mother and siblings’ memories of their years on the run, Tyler had also kept journals of her own from ‘pretty much as soon as I could hold a pencil’. Those youthful writings painted a picture of a slightly confused young girl, an angsty teenager, a child-of-nowhere which lends its name to her book’s current title: No Way Home.

  Tyler and her siblings had lived in 13 houses in five countries on two continents by the time she was 10 years old. Her father had gotten involved with drug smuggling before his children were born and found himself incredibly successful at it, amassing huge wealth and vowing to give up the criminal lifestyle when he finally had a young family. He was a man of great charisma and wild stories; even now, Tyler speaks with quiet pride about how he rolled joints for the Beatles and smoked with Bob Marley in his heyday.

  He couldn’t resist the allure of that one more big deal, however, and a massive smuggle from Thailand would eventually prove his undoing. A cat-and-mouse game with authorities eventually led to his decision to flee prosecution, with he and his wife, Sarah, agreeing they’d rather keep the family together – hence taking their three young children on the run.

  Tyler, left, and her sister still managed to visit their father after he separated from their mother and moved from country to country as he evaded authorities. Here they are in St Lucia for her 12th birthday, the fateful trip that saw him tracked down by the authorities +9
  Tyler, left, and her sister still managed to visit their father after he separated from their mother and moved from country to country as he evaded authorities. Here they are in St Lucia for her 12th birthday, the fateful trip that saw him tracked down by the authorities

  Tyler says she admires her father, pictured, who is originally from New York and lived a life that is the 'stuff of Hollywood movies' +9
  Tyler says she admires her father, pictured, who is originally from New York and lived a life that is the 'stuff of Hollywood movies'

  Tyler says that 'if you wish for things to be different, that¿s wishing yourself to be a different person ¿ and I don¿t wish for that. I would love for it to come with a little less heartache'. Pictured with her father on a beach in Portugal +9
  Tyler says that 'if you wish for things to be different, that’s wishing yourself to be a different person – and I don’t wish for that. I would love for it to come with a little less heartache'. Pictured with her father on a beach in Portugal

  They moved frequently and Sarah was often unhappy but, while a girlish Tyler had no way of knowing the nature of their travels, she sensed and embraced the air of adventure. She knew there was a different name on her passport (her real name, since her mother didn’t want the children associated with anything illegal) than the name she used in everyday life (an alias.)

  ‘I never questioned anything, because you don’t as a child, Tyler tells DailyMail.com. ‘I had an awareness that it was strange, because when people asked me about my life, I would tell them, and they would look at me like it was strange. I quite liked that. I thought that was interesting, and I thought it made us different, and I liked that … there was never any suspicion it was criminal.’

  Often the family lived in enclaves with other international fugitives, such as when they lived in the South of France, with neighbors including former Haitian dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. The adults in these fugitive families would trade tips on local living and how to evade capture, but many of the kids were still oblivious – though many still keep in contact after realizing their shared unusual upbringings, Tyler says.

  Tyler and her siblings were instructed to never discuss family matters.

  ‘The parents knew who to talk to, but we didn’t; you understand that there was a secret and a secret that was important and if you told the secret your parents might go to prison – but you didn’t know exactly where the parameters of that secretly were … do you were always kind of just treading carefully,’ she says.

  Tyler’s mother was miserable in France, however, and the family would eventually return to her native Britain, where Tyler’s parents would separate – not long before detectives turned up on their door in the rural English countryside and Tyler’s father would go on the run, away from his family and outside of England but maintaining as much contact as possible. He would communicate through friends or letters and phone box conversations and arrange trips for his daughters to come visit him in secret locations.

  One of those trips to the Caribbean would prove fateful; authorities knew Glaser would want to see his youngest child on her birthday, and they tracked the travel plans of Tyler and her sister, who were flying using their real passports. Their father initially evaded capture and left St Lucia, but he returned to the island a few weeks later and was arrested before being turned back over to the US authorities.

  Tyler and her sister, two years older, returned to school in England but kept in close contact with their father, especially visiting him during school vacations. But the family maintained its code of silence when it came to outsiders.

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  ‘We were all teenagers; everyone was smoking pot,’ Tyler tells DailyMail.com, particularly singling out the folk hero legends of infamous Welsh smuggler ‘Mr Nice’ Howard Marks.

  ‘I’d be wanting to say, “My dad’s a pot smuggler, too, and he used to roll joints for the Beatles and he used to smoke with Bob Marley … I’d have to bite my tongue not to be saying this to them because I wanted the extra cool points.’

  When she did become more comfortable sharing her father’s criminal status, however, the rest of the family also got behind her effort to tell their story in a book.

  ‘They’ve been incredible,’ she tells DailyMail.com. ‘There hasn’t been a point at which they haven’t been behind me doing this. I always wanted to write, and we grew up with a story like this. It’s almost impossible to write anything else.’

  In addition to her journals, her family members were also great research resources – and not just her father.

  ‘My sister has read every single version that I have written from the beginning,’ Tyler says of her sister, two years her senior, whereas their brother is seven years older. ‘So me and her went through most of it side by side, and his experience was slightly different.

  ‘She helped with a lot of the memories that I didn’t have; she had a huge part in the writing.

  Tyler visited her father at Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex (pictured) in California, where he was serving a ten-year sentence on drug charges +9
  Tyler visited her father at Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex (pictured) in California, where he was serving a ten-year sentence on drug charges

  Tyler says her family were 'amazingly zen' about her memoir, though her mother has only recently started reading the book +9
  Tyler tells DailyMail.com she felt a great responsibility to tell her family's story 'in a way that is fair and representative and true for them, as well' +9
  Tyler, right, tells DailyMail.com she felt a great responsibility to tell her family's story 'in a way that is fair and representative and true for them, as well'

  ‘All my family, they’ve all contributed their stories and their memories to it, and I couldn’t have done it any other way. I said all the way along, if you don’t want me to do this, I will stop … and every piece of press I do, I get their permission.’

  She tells DailyMail.com: 'It's a huge responsibility. I think most people who write memoirs (maybe this is a massive generalization) I think a lot of people who write memoirs often write about family members who have passed away or who are estranged or who they no longer feel responsibility towards - whereas me and my family are incredibly close. And so it does come with responsibility to speak on their behalf in a way that is fair and representative and true for them, as well.'

  But she adds that, luckily, 'they're amazingly zen.'

  Her mother, especially, gave her youngest child free reign when it came to writing the book; she’s only in the process of reading the memoir now, Tyler admits slightly nervously.

  ‘She is independent and fearless and entirely unconventional; she makes her own mind up about the world and has led an extraordinary life, because I think most of us are scared to make unconventional decisions – and so we end up leading lives which follow a certain path … her life could be a book in itself, for sure,’ Tyler says of her mother, who ran away from home as a teenager to her first marriage before meeting Tyler’s father at a New York party (though she’d marry a second husband, too, before settling with Glaser).

  ‘She didn’t want to put any pressure on me to worry about what she was thinking, so she let me do the whole thing and she always said, “I trust you” … She’s not someone who really cares what people think about her. She worried that she’d come across as a bad mother, and I feel like she was an extraordinary mother. I think anyone who reads the book would think that, too.’

  And, despite the heartbreak that resulted from her father’s illegal activities, Tyler reserves similar feelings for him, as well.

  ‘I admire my dad,’ she tells DailyMail.com. ‘Most of us don’t lead lives that are the stuff of Hollywood movies … He’s always wanted a relationship with us. It was that relationship that got him caught. He would’ve been free if he’d been willing to give us up; I think coming to understand that is part of that process of forgiveness and the choices he made and what we went through because of him.

  ‘You can’t wish for anything to be different, can you? Because if you wish for things to be different, that’s wishing yourself to be a different person – and I don’t wish for that. I would love for it to come with a little less heartache, and maybe three years rather than six if he has to go to prison, or, you know, they could have just changed their minds and dropped the charges once pot got legalized.’

  She adds: ‘My parents did everything they could to protect us under the circumstances from what was happening. The story’s fundamentally redemptive; we came through it.’

• New York Post - https://nypost.com/2018/03/24/my-dad-was-secretly-a-drug-smuggling-kingpin-on-the-run/

  My dad was secretly a drug-smuggling kingpin on the run
  By Jane Ridley March 24, 2018 | 6:52pm | Updated
  Modal Trigger
  My dad was secretly a drug-smuggling kingpin on the run
  Tyler Wetherall (left to right), Ben Glaser, and Caitlin. Tyler Wetherall
  In the fall of 1993, when Tyler Wetherall was almost 10 years old, she came home from school with her sister, Caitlin, 12, and saw two strangers talking to their mom.

  “Straightaway we sensed something was wrong,” recalled Wetherall, now 34, who lived in a quaint British town at the time.

  The guests were detectives from Scotland Yard looking for their American father — who, unbeknownst to them, had been a fugitive for the past eight years.

  He was on the run from “Continuing Criminal Enterprise” charges as one of the kingpins of a drug cartel that, among other offenses, had smuggled 30 tons of Thai marijuana into the US in the early ’80s. ​

  ‘We never questioned any of the moves, but I hated each one.’“It was the era of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs,” said Wetherall. “If you were caught, the sentences were draconian.”
  She details her experiences as the unwitting daughter of a wanted criminal, Benjamin Glaser, in her memoir “No Way Home” (St. Martin’s Press), out April 3. In it she describes her nomadic childhood living in 13 different homes in five countries.

  “We never questioned any of the moves, but I hated each one,” said the Brooklyn-based writer.

  She was born in October 1983 in San Francisco, where her father had masterminded a profitable import business shipping and distributing pot from Southeast Asia. The FBI had caught wind of his exploits and was watching the family closely.

  In June 1985, Glaser and wis wife felt unnerved enough to leave their posh home and flee to Rome. It seemed the Feds were closing in on Glaser, gathering enough evidence for an indictment.

  From Italy, they moved to Portugal and, months later, the South of France — where their fellow fugitives in the upscale enclave of Mougins included exiled Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

  Modal Trigger
  St. Martin's Press
  “We were surrounded by a lot of wealth, but, since everyone was living that way, it just felt ordinary,” said Wetherall. “[They] would exchange information on how to get by, how to get your kid into school under a fake name and how to spend money [that had been obtained illegally].”

  However, life on the run was too much for Wetherall’s mother, Sarah, a British former model, and she insisted the family move to England. Soon after, in late 1987, Sarah and Benjamin divorced.

  “I was devastated,” said Wetherall, who was 4 at the time. “Each year, I wished on every birthday candle that they would get back together.”

  After that, Wetherall and her sister spent weekends and vacations visiting their dad in London, where he’d moved to, or on a trip with him to the French Alps or whatever exotic locale he was temporarily holed up in.

  All seemed fine until that 1993 visit from Scotland Yard. Interest had been renewed in Glaser after a group of his former drug-running associates had been tracked down and arrested. The family’s house was searched, and their photographs and documents were taken away as evidence. Even Wetherall’s schoolgirl diary was confiscated.

  The children couldn’t be questioned because they were minors, and Sarah refused to give up her ex-husband’s location. She alerted Glaser about the raid and, using a fake passport, he escaped London for life on the run again in continental Europe. A week later, Sarah sat down her kids — then ages 9 and 11 — and told them as much of the truth she felt they could understand.

  “You are not going to be able to see Dad for a while,” she began. “He had to leave the country for legal reasons — something he needs to explain to you himself.”

  The next three years were surreal. The family became convinced their telephone line was tapped and that they were often being followed. Communication with Glaser was done through letters — “He never pinned himself down to a location and we knew better than to ask,” explained Wetherall — or snatched conversations at prearranged times in phone booths.

  Such was his love for his daughters that Glaser would take the chance of having them visit him even while he was on the lam. They once met him in France, for example, driven there by one of their dad’s neighbors.

  “A lot of men in his position would have left their families, but Dad still wanted to be a big part of our lives,” said Wetherall. “It was [a] testimony to what an amazing father he was — despite some of his reckless decisions.”

  Modal Trigger
  Tyler WetherallAnnie Wermiel/NY Post
  His desire to stay in touch with his girls wound up being his downfall. In October 1995, Scotland Yard, working in conjunction with the FBI, received a tip that Wetherall and her sister were with their dad in St. Lucia, where he was working as a hotel manager.

  “The evening of my 12th birthday, he got a frantic call from Mum saying they were on his trail,” says Wetherall.

  The girls were put on the next flight home and Glaser slipped the net again. But not for long. After spending four months traveling in Europe, he returned to St. Lucia, where he was finally arrested. It almost came as a relief.

  “I think he’d had it with running and hiding,” said Wetherall.

  Her dad was sentenced in California to 10 years in prison, later reduced to five years and 10 months. He came clean with his daughters about his murky past and the toll it took on the family while maintaining that smuggling pot is a “victimless crime.”

  Out on supervised release in 2004, he is now an investment advisor living in northern California. Sarah is retired and living in the United Kingdom.

  “There have been times when I have been angry with him and having a parent in prison carries a sense of shame,” Wetherall said. However, she has made her peace with her father, especially after spending months with him researching and writing her memoir.

  “I have huge admiration for my dad,” she said. “He is a true adventurer.”

• Deborah Kalb - http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/q-with-tyler-wetherall.html

  Sunday, May 13, 2018
  Q&A with Tyler Wetherall

  Tyler Wetherall is the author of the new book No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run. It details her life as the daughter of a fugitive hiding from the FBI. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Guardian and The Brooklyn Magazine. She lives in London and New York.

  Q: You note that you’ve been working on this book for many years, and that it took different forms. What initially made you want to write about your family, and how did you decide on a memoir in the end?

  A: My dad wanted to find a ghostwriter to write his story. I was working as a magazine journalist in London, and I didn’t want anyone else to write our story. All those years he was in prison, he was writing a manuscript, and he would send me chapters to read…

  He was keen as well, and I quit my job in London and moved to Los Angeles. I interviewed him every day. It was a special time for us both. I was only 24 then, and thought I could write this in a year. Then you realize you don’t know how to write a book.

  I realized that telling his story almost made me feel angry at him again, and that we’ve heard the story of the male kingpin whose wife and children [were sidelined]. I wanted to tell [that less-told aspect of] the story.

  I was trying to recreate scenes from the 1970s and I didn’t have the experience [to do that]. I started writing what I could remember. I wrote it as a novel. It seemed an impossibility to do it as a memoir. I got an Arts Council grant and could take a half a year off to write full time, and I finished the novel.

  It just didn’t work. People would say, It sounds like a memoir, if this is true then why are you calling it a novel? I realized I was calling it a novel to keep my story at arm’s length. That was based on being scared, the same as when I was a child.

  I started playing around with it being a memoir. I realized the problems with the novel would be solved if I wrote it as a memoir, and I wrote it in a year. I wrote three books in the space of eight years!

  Q: What do you think you learned, both about your family and yourself, from writing the book?

  A: It’s difficult. It changes with whatever moment you’re in. What I’ve taken away from it most strongly is the idea that the past is a choice we make. How we tell our story is a choice.

  My relationship to my past has changed. I chose to see my story as redemptive, to see my parents’ actions as out of a deep love for us. I understand it that way—in choosing the narrative, it’s changing my relationship with my past. That’s been really interesting. You can tell a story negatively or positively.

  About my family, so much. My mum’s about to turn 70 and my dad’s 74. Our time with these people is short. I’m gratified that I got to learn their stories. I want to learn as much as I can from them. That’s still far from knowing them because people are so deeply complex.

  Q: In the book, you describe many difficult experiences. How hard was it to write about them? Was it cathartic at all?

  A: It definitely wasn’t cathartic at the time. I feel very resolved about it now. It was very difficult to write. Some scenes left me physically shaking. It was an emotional reaction I hadn’t yet acknowledged.

  Writing it as a memoir was a lot harder. I had taken the distance away from myself and the protagonist. It’s terrifying putting yourself on the page.

  The hardest thing was that I struggled most deeply with a sense of responsibility with the people implicated, who I’ve written about, and the fear of causing pain. It plagued me through the whole thing. That’s the hard part of memoir writing.

  Q: That leads to the next thing I was going to ask: What do your family members think of the book?

  A: I have an incredibly loving family and I feel very grateful. I think it was very difficult for my parents to read. My actual lived childhood was a happy one. I had abundant joys, parents who loved and nurtured me, but the book strings together our most painful times. For my parents, it read like a bombardment of the worst of times.

  All the way through, they championed me, and talked for hours to me about the past, for eight years. My brother and sister read multiple drafts, and have been incredibly supportive. Everybody cries at the end.

  Q: What are you working on now?

  A: I’ve been working on a novel simultaneously. Whenever the memoir became intense, I went back to that. I hope to have a draft by the end of the summer. It’s so much fun to be writing fiction and be free from the issues of responsibility to anyone but yourself.

  And I’m working on a screenplay as well. It’s fun to be in other areas. And I’m a journalist and a teacher.

  --Interview with Deborah Kalb

Print Marked Items
No Way Home
New Statesman.
147.5416 (Apr. 27, 2018): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text: 
No Way Home
Tyler Wetherall
When high-profile criminals are caught, their stories make headlines --but less is said about the processing done by the families left behind. Tyler
Wetherall's No Way Home is a brave and vulnerable attempt to do just that. After her father's crimes came to the attention of the FBI, her
seemingly perfect home was packed into suitcases and thrust into a life on the run--as an unwitting fugitive she had 15 homes in five countries.
Her memoir recounts a beautifully detailed story about family, felony and the redemption that writing itself can offer to those we love.
St Martin's Press, 320pp. 18.95 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"No Way Home." New Statesman, 27 Apr. 2018, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537981781/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bfede64. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537981781
Wetherall, Tyler: NO WAY HOME
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Wetherall, Tyler NO WAY HOME St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-250-11219-4
A British-American journalist's account of growing up the daughter of a fugitive father.
Until she was 9, Wetherall knew herself as Tyler Kane, the daughter of an American businessman and a former British model. Her family lived a
peripatetic life that had taken them to "thirteen houses, five countries and two continents" before she was 10; yet Wetherall never saw these moves
as odd. But when Scotland Yard detectives questioned her mother about a man they called Ben Glaser, the author suddenly realized that her entire
life had been a lie. Everything--from her last name to the travels that had taken her family from California to Italy, Portugal, France, and Britain--
had been ruses her father used to evade capture for criminal activity. Shuttling deftly between present and past, Wetherall pieces together the
fragments of early years spent on the run to make sense of her life and her relationship to her fugitive father. She visited him in secret at hideouts
in France and on the island of St. Lucia and came to know him as the man who had made his fortune smuggling marijuana from Thailand.
Desperately confused, the author struggled to reconcile "the Dad who spent hours, years, teaching me how to swim, how to ski, [and] how to ride
a bike" with the criminal sought by international authorities. Glaser was finally captured when the author was 12, and for the next several years,
she visited him at the California prison where he served his sentence. Her unresolved rage toward her father wrought havoc with her teenage
years. Eventually, she made peace with him, realizing that for all she had lost, she had regained both a father and a new perspective on a life story
he had helped define. Revealing and emotionally nuanced, Wetherall's book probes the dark underside of family relationships to uncover the
meaning of acceptance and forgiveness.
A compassionate memoir of self-discovery.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wetherall, Tyler: NO WAY HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461312/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aac241a6. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461312
NO WAY HOME
Carla Jean Whitley
BookPage.
(Apr. 2018): p26.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text: 
NO WAY HOME
By Tyler Wetherall
St. Martin's $26.99, 320 pages ISBN 9781250112194 Audio, eBook available
MEMOIR
Life was an adventure for young Tyler Kane. By age 9, her family had lived in nine homes. By age 12, she began to understand why.
Her name wasn't Kane after all, she learned, but Wetherall. Her family's frequent moves to different continents weren't adventures--they were
hiding from authorities.
Wetherall and her siblings were the children of a fugitive. Their parents began to reveal the truth as it became inevitable. Wetherall would notice a
black car following her outside of her mother's house, and every visit to her father was shrouded in mystery.
On Wetherall's 12th birthday, Scotland Yard finally caught up to her father. But even as her dad served prison time for his crimes, she remained
unsure about what he had done that landed him there. Wetherall and her sister dreamed up potential scenarios. Surely it was more than tax
evasion. But could their father have done something as serious as kill a person? And if he had, how would they react? Their father had shared
literature that seemed designed to increase their empathy for people on the run--Les Miserables, for example. But The Fugitive was off limits.
Had he done something they would be able to forgive?
Wetherall's captivating No Way Home is a reminder that our actions affect not only our own paths but also the lives of everyone close to us. Our
stories are intertwined with our loved ones' lives, no matter what distances--or steel bars--come between us.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Whitley, Carla Jean. "NO WAY HOME." BookPage, Apr. 2018, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532528599/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d7800dd6. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532528599
No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run
Alison Spanner
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run. By Tyler Wetherall. Apr. 2018. 320p. St. Martin's, $26.99 (9781250112194). 818.
When Wetherall's mother finally explained why two Scotland Yard officers were at the house, the explanation defied belief. Wetherall's father was
a wanted man, and the last name embroidered on her school uniform was not her own. The fact that her father always flew separately on vacation
and their multiple moves (13 houses, 5 countries, and 2 continents before she was 9 years old) wasn't due to her parents' eccentricities but because
her father was a fugitive. Until her father was captured, on her twelfth birthday, Wetherall and her sister would fly to wherever he was in hiding
for vacations and return home lying to their friends about where they had been and where their father was. In fact, the most central rule to the
author's childhood was to say nothing at all about anything. As Wetherall grew into a self-destructive teenager, she demanded that the truth be
revealed. Wonderfully suspenseful and an unexpected page-turner, this story of an immensely likable family under an incredible strain will stay
with readers.--Alison Spanner
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Spanner, Alison. "No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 16. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250796/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=262205a0. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250796

"No Way Home." New Statesman, 27 Apr. 2018, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537981781/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 June 2018. "Wetherall, Tyler: NO WAY HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461312/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 June 2018. Whitley, Carla Jean. "NO WAY HOME." BookPage, Apr. 2018, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532528599/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 June 2018. Spanner, Alison. "No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250796/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 June 2018.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-father-on-the-run-and-a-young-daughter-trying-to-understand-her-world/2018/04/27/e5df8714-3741-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a15221aff8ff
  Word count: 1108

  If family secrets are the stuff memoirs are made of, it’s no wonder the genre is flourishing. Nearly every family has them, and rare is the family that encourages its members to explore the dark corners of its past or present. Tyler Wetherall’s was no exception, but in her case, words had a particular power that necessitated silence. As she puts it, “We all grew up with one rule: don’t tell!”

  It is a small miracle that Wetherall has finally broken that silence in her debut memoir, “No Way Home,” having grown up under the constant admonition to never mention her father to anyone. Even after the danger has long passed, she is terrified at the imagined consequences of committing words to the page. She curls up in fear one day and frantically calls her father to make sure once again that her parents won’t go to prison if she tells their story. Yes, her father tells her, it’s okay to talk now. And more than that, he wants her to, hoping that something good can come out of all they have been through. And indeed it has, for Wetherall has written a luminous memoir that no one who reads it will soon forget.

  The book’s two parts, “Before” and “After,” bracketed with short sections labeled “Now,” not only balance the book but almost split it into two. “Before” has the feeling of a thriller told from the point of view of innocence. It’s an arresting, absorbing read as we come to know Tyler the child, the youngest in her family and, it would seem, the most attuned to the unspoken and unspeakable. She is swept along from home to home, mostly within England, inured to the routine abandonment of things and clandestine trips to remote phone booths to talk to her father, who is on the run across the continent. Men in black suits, driving black cars, show up at her home and turn it upside down in search of clues to her father’s whereabouts. She and her sister are taken by strange friends across the Channel to reunite briefly with their father, whose smell, Wetherall says, is like home to her. Their visits are small adventures any kid would relish. They float on the Seine in Paris, ski in the Alps and scuba dive in Saint Lucia, enveloped in the bright sunshine of their father’s love. But all the while they are haunted by a dark cloud of secrets they don’t fully grasp.

  In this part of the book, Tyler is aware only that her father has had to flee England for legal reasons. Her mother will tell her and her sister only that he did something when they were little and they were all living in California. “She dismissed it as a ‘financial issue really, dodgy taxes.’ ” Through it all, as Tyler struggles to carry on with the business of growing up, she conveys her exceptional yet familiar experiences in language that makes the reader stop and savor, or simply chuckle. She is witty and eloquent on the passing of childhood, describing how games and toys lose their power. She remembers fondly playing horses, pretending that she was a Lipizzaner “crashing over jumps erected from garden furniture” and that her sister was her trainer. It was the one game that “had survived long after other make-believe worlds had crumbled away, their inhabitants dead and their villains unvanquished.” Meanwhile, she writes, “our miniature farmyard had become dusty and the animals sticky and apathetic with time, and the zoo set lay abandoned, with zebras and tigers in dangerous proximity.” In place of childish things, she now had the secret of her father’s flight from the law and the fears that came with it: “I had a theory that if I thought about all the things I least wanted to happen, then somehow, by some law of probability, they were less likely to occur. I made terrible things happen in my head night after night like a prophylactic indulgence in the macabre.”

  The title of the book’s second half, “After,” signifies not only the fallout of her father’s arrest but also the aftermath of her fall from innocence. Now she knows what he has done and why the FBI and Scotland Yard have been searching for him all these years. As the scales fall from her eyes, the tone and perspective shift. She is a teenager now, struggling to figure out what all teenagers want to know: Who are my parents? Where have I come from? And who am I? This requires getting her parents to talk. Tyler finds out that her father is wanted not only for being a multimillion-dollar drug smuggler but also for being a kingpin. He has been charged with heading up a “Continuing Criminal Enterprise,” the same charge brought against Al Capone. His defense to his daughters is that he smuggled only marijuana, which isn’t a dangerous drug, and that he was helping to support other families. Tyler, however, can’t accept that he continued to take risks despite his already vast wealth and his responsibilities to his young family. She was less than a year old when they fled California.

  In the second half, we are in the world of grown-ups trying to fix what they have broken. We miss the wry voice of innocent young Tyler trying blindly to make sense of everything, and we almost regret having our eyes opened. The prose becomes more matter-of-fact and less luminously ponderous. Yet soon it becomes clear that the questions driving her story are no longer what will happen to her fugitive father and what has he done, but what will happen to Tyler? Will she survive it all? Will she maintain a relationship with her dad? Who will she ultimately become? Now we are more firmly in the familiar territory of the coming-of-age memoir.

  It is perhaps fitting, then, that Wetherall begins to understand herself as not simply a product of one family’s experiences, and not only as part of a far-flung network of fugitive families, but also as a member of “a generation of nomads.” Having settled in America, a country of immigrants and wanderers, she comes to see home as “a work in progress.” As in any good coming-of-age story, our heroine has left family behind and begun to make her home in the wider world. Now that she has done so, we eagerly await the new stories she will tell.

• Book Page
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22456-tyler-wetherall-no-way-home#.WzMQgxJKhR0
  Word count: 282

  April 2018

  NO WAY HOME
  Childhood on the run
  BookPage review by Carla Jean Whitley

  Life was an adventure for young Tyler Kane. By age 9, her family had lived in nine homes. By age 12, she began to understand why.

  Her name wasn’t Kane after all, she learned, but Wetherall. Her family’s frequent moves to different continents weren’t adventures—they were hiding from authorities.

  Wetherall and her siblings were the children of a fugitive. Their parents began to reveal the truth as it became inevitable. Wetherall would notice a black car following her outside of her mother’s house, and every visit to her father was shrouded in mystery.

  On Wetherall’s 12th birthday, Scotland Yard finally caught up to her father. But even as her dad served prison time for his crimes, she remained unsure about what he had done that landed him there. Wetherall and her sister dreamed up potential scenarios. Surely it was more than tax evasion. But could their father have done something as serious as kill a person? And if he had, how would they react? Their father had shared literature that seemed designed to increase their empathy for people on the run—Les Misérables, for example. But The Fugitive was off limits. Had he done something they would be able to forgive?

  Wetherall’s captivating No Way Home is a reminder that our actions affect not only our own paths but also the lives of everyone close to us. Our stories are intertwined with our loved ones’ lives, no matter what distances—or steel bars—come between us.

• Brooklyn Based
  https://brooklynbased.com/2018/03/31/review-no-way-home-a-memoir-of-life-on-the-run/
  Word count: 623

  Review: ‘No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run’
  BY SHANA LIEBMAN

  Tyler Wetherall, right, discovered at an early age that her father was a criminal running from the FBI, a revelation that upended her childhood and forms the subject of her new memoir.

  No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run
  Tyler Wetherall
  St. Martin’s Press, 2018

  The hook is undeniable: What happens when Scotland Yard shows up looking for your father—and it turns out your loving dad is an internationally wanted criminal?

  Tyler Wetherall, whose own name was changed several times to protect her father’s hiding places, had one hell of a childhood—13 houses in 5 countries before she turned ten. Routinely followed by FBI, she was forced to make calls from hidden phone booths and forbidden to tell anyone the unknowable truths enveloping her family. This compelling memoir is her attempt to make sense of it all, and she does a beautiful job.

  The story starts with Wetherall as a child—who despite her family’s turmoil, gets on fantastically with her older sister, her best friend and perfect counterpart, and her half-brother who is kind and witty. Their heroic mother is a former model who navigates an impossible life and somehow still manages to be an eccentric, thoughtful and empathetic parent.

  At first, this portrayal seemed overly rosy—but it is the view through Wetherall’s childish lens and we are along for her journey, slowly unraveling the truth as she does. The suspense she builds is brilliant. Is her father really a criminal? What did he do, or not do? Will he get caught? Who is he really?

  Wetherall, who is now a young journalist in New York City, is capable of profound observations: “We practice ourselves with our family, falling back on stock phrases and phobias like talismans through which we return to who we once were.” Her prose is graceful and inventive, describing a rickety funicular “rattling like an old man’s cough.” When St. Lucian women carrying firewood on their heads walk by, she observes “the whites of their soles winked as we passed.”

  The stunning twist of this achingly honest memoir is that her father—a fugitive who dragged his own family through a mess he knowingly created—is not all bad. He’s a charming badass who wears a leather jacket, drives a blue Harley and hung out with Bob Marley. He is intensely loyal to his wide net of influential friends who would do anything to help him. Despite his frequent absences, he teaches his children to swim, ski, ride a bike, do long division, scuba dive, play tennis, shuffle cards and never give up.

  At one point Wetherall realizes that she feels safest when she is physically close to her father, “when in fact the opposite is true.” It’s mind-blowing to realize that “Your father is not the person you thought he was, which means neither are you.” And despite the fact that he selfishly devastated his family, he doesn’t desert them even when it would ensure his own freedom. On the other hand, he doesn’t turn himself in to save them. Are his choices forgivable?

  It’s no surprise that it took Wetherall so many years to untangle the meaning of home.

  Tyler Wetherall reads from No Way Home April 9 at Books are Magic! in Carroll Gardens, and on April 16 as part of Narratively’s Memoir Monday, hosted at powerHouse Arena in Dumbo.

  Tags: Booklyn, memoir, No Way Home, Spring Reads 2018, Tyler Wetherall

• The Arts Fuse
  http://artsfuse.org/169346/book-review-no-way-home-a-memoir-with-quirk-and-heft/
  Word count: 1076

  Book Review: “No Way Home” — A Memoir with Quirk and Heft
  APRIL 10, 2018

  No Way Home is a model for how to tell a weird, complicated story in a way that will make the reader hang on tight for the whole ride.

  No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run by Tyler Wetherall. St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $26.99.

  By Katharine Coldiron

  No one would ever wish for a traumatic childhood just to have something good to write about. No writer sets out to have a messy life for the sake of penning a searing memoir later. But when life happens that way, and the writer is skilled enough to record his or her life compellingly, an opportunity to publish that story will likely appear. Such is the case with Tyler Wetherall’s first book, No Way Home, a memoir about Wetherall’s life as the daughter of Ben Glaser, a major marijuana smuggler. In the mid-1980s, Wetherall’s family “went on the run,” moving through a dozen houses in Europe in just a few years. Ultimately, after her parents split up, her father relocated to a Caribbean island to hide. He was caught on Wetherall’s twelfth birthday by authorities who tracked him down via the paperwork generated by her visit to him.

  This story, and the many emotional narratives that twine around it, are recounted by Wetherall with unusual sequencing. The book is written as a series of non-parallel flashes forward and back. The present day in Cornwall shifts to the mid-1990s in Saint Lucia, which becomes the early 1980s in California, which loops back to the present day in Cornwall. Although the book starts slowly, the storyline soon becomes as exciting as a thriller. A scene in which Wetherall’s mother hides a cell phone inside a couch while the FBI searches the home gallops along with high tension.

  In fact, although the action in No Way Home is spurred at each turn by Wetherall’s father Ben, Wetherall’s mother, Sarah, easily emerges as the book’s most fascinating character. She is a determined, prickly, and resourceful woman. Wetherall explains with nonchalance that Sarah was a model and actress in her youth, that she ran off to marry her first husband at sixteen, and that she bargained with Ben that, if she agreed to her son’s circumcision, their second child would take her surname instead of her husband’s. Wetherall’s breezy storytelling paints all this as nearly normal.

  But then, nothing is normal in No Way Home. The practical details of Ben living as a criminal in hiding — he smuggled many millions of dollars of marijuana in the 1970s, and eluded authorities for eleven years — are odd enough. But equally unusual are the ways in which Wetherall must reckon with her family as the center of her emotional life. On a prison visit, her father tries to tell her about his decision to marry someone else. But he ends up talking at Wetherall instead, and she tamps down her feelings out of a sense of futility.

  He continued to explain to me how I felt, but he was wrong this time, and that made it all the more isolating. Mom and Dad divorcing had fallen way down the hierarchy of problems in recent years, trumped by the FBI and prison; I was upset that I had found out through someone else that he was getting married, and I held on tight to this reason, because if I let it go, I might have to admit that really I was just angry. It was easier to be angry with Dad for marrying Lana than it was to be angry about everything else, and it was easier to resent that he hadn’t told me this one thing, rather than all the other important things he had kept from me.

  The memoir is written in plain language, but it delves with grace into Wetherall’s instability as well as her discomfort with the fugitive life. The central part of the volume takes up the smuggling and fugitive actions that sent her family on the run, though the suspense of the book’s final third doesn’t derive from these external circumstances but from Ben’s inability to understand what he has cost his family. Wetherall is the most visible manifestation of that price. A conversation after Ben gets out of prison in 2001 makes the emotional sacrifice clear.

  “I know you wish it hadn’t turned out this way—obviously—but really you just wish you’d never been caught, don’t you? You never acknowledge that you shouldn’t have smuggled drugs when you had a young family who needed you…”

  Dad had pulled into the driveway of Artie’s house and turned off the engine. He sat back in his seat looking out over the Bay. I saw him struggling, my words hammering away at years of fortified denial.

  No Way Home is not as hard-hitting or “brave” as certain splashy memoirs are, but its storyline is unique and intriguing. This is a special family, and for more than just its remarkable history: its members have charm, intelligence, and realistically mixed-up relationships. Wetherall’s siblings provide additional quirk and heft to her story—her sister, Caitlin, has different methods of processing emotion than Wetherall, providing a rounded perspective to the family’s many transitions, and her half-brother, Evan, is both funny and grounded, offering levity and solid advice at the right moments. Through it all, they are loving; Sarah maintains healthy boundaries and is a caring mother, while Ben takes many risks with his freedom just to spend time with his children. In fact, it’s a risk for the sake of family togetherness that gets him caught.

  Another memoir about a non-dysfunctional family, no matter how extreme its circumstances, would seem to promise a familiar and placid read. But No Way Home is anything but. In fact, it’s a model for how to tell a weird, complicated story in a way that will make the reader hang on tight for the whole ride.

  Katharine Coldiron‘s work has appeared in Ms., the Guardian, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.

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