neil haugerud

Holiday Forever is a fictional story of the rural Midwest, in the early nineteen hundreds, of the family farm boyhood and manhood of Billy Bartel who nearly lost his life to grief and drink, of is daughter Nancy and the aunt who raised her; and of an unusually progressive care facility named Holiday Forever, with an 'anything goes policy' - probably the only care facility ever close by the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency and a state vice squad. It's a story of endurance, as young Billy faces one tragedy after another, including the violent death of his father, and subsequent loss of the family farm to a lecherous uncle. Then Billy settles into a drab life working at the foundry, going out with "the boys," and is unprepared when the pretty young secretary, Clair proposes to him. Or did he propose to her? Although Billy loves Clair deeply, married life presents challenges to this young man whose only previous experience with "romance" was with the infamous Ellsville grils.

Holiday Forever is primarily a love story; the love of Billy for his wife Clair and the love he missed with his daughter Nancy, the love Nancy's Aunt Ruth learned to give to herself and then passed on to others, and the love between Dianne Russy and Lila Mae Higgins, two lesbian lovers more bold than usual for the time and place they lived. But it's also about rapacious small-town lawyers, bungling DEA agents, and the power of the mind and heart to transform wherever and whatever it finds itself.

Holiday Forever - the nursing and health care facility- challenges the simplistic view of the world we live in and shocks the community with its policies of living and approaching life's end with total abandonment and enthusiasm.

Holiday Forever, the novel, examines life through real life situations - often humorously and often tragically. It questions the values and consequences of foolish consistency, universal beliefs, and limits of any kind, orthodoxy, conformity, absurdity, intuition, well adjustment, religion, drug policy, gambling, grief, nudity and sexual preferences.