From the title, I expected a straightforward memoir, but this reads like a novel made up of disjointed , patched together episodes. The book starts and ends in 1989 in Austin, Texas. Helton is a college dropout with not so great job prospects and a frustrating relationship with Susan, the love of his life. They met as teenagers, married young, screwed around on each other, and don’t know if they should stay together or not.

He doesn’t get along great with his family, or Susan’s father, a mentally unstable ex-football player. He has a strange, almost flirty relationship with Susan’s mom, with whom he spends a lot of time after Susan leaves town to work on a movie. It takes a while for the fact that she’s probably cheating on him with the movie producer to sink in, and frankly I wondered why he was even upset, since they had a pattern of cheating on each other rather frequently, and seemed to actively dislike one another at times. He meanders through a bunch of different jobs, hookers, drugs, and weird violent friendships for what seems like years.

The last straw job-wise, is when he has to work refinishing the floor of a warehouse with dangerous chemicals, inadequate safety equipment, and bumbling coworkers—especially Colin, the mumbly elderly English man who can’t keep up and stops every few minutes for a booze break or to drunkenly tell the same few stories about the boxing matches he used to compete in. Helton doesn’t want to waste his life and become like Colin, challenging younger men to fights, living out of a van, drinking himself to death.

Helton finally gets it together and decides to return to college, and lives a solitary life with his books and a stray cat that he lets into his apartment from time to time. Susan comes back and tries to start up their dysfunctional pattern again, but this time Helton has had it, and tells her to leave. Without any fuss, she does, and that’s that. His new companion is the cat, who keeps sneaking in and making herself comfortable, which is preferable to the bizarre dramas that make up the rest of the book.

A lot of crazy, depressing and bizarrely amusing things happen here, but I think this story could be that of anybody in that time, place, and circumstance, just being an aimless young person trying to experience life and find affection. But Helton is so deadpan and removed from his own emotions that it’s hard to care about what happens to him, and that’s why this book didn’t hold my interest all that much.

BAD JOBS AND POOR DECISIONS by J.R. Helton intrigued me because of being set in Austin, Texas and because it promised to talk about working class life. I did enjoy the references to various locations in Austin, including UT's campus, the capital building and various neighborhoods, but I definitely did not enjoy reading about the drugs, alcohol and numerous poor decisions referenced in the title. If this is truly "dispatches from the working class" then we even more serious issues than I thought in this country. Turn instead to Vance's Hillbilly Elegy which we have used successfully as assigned reading with several classes at school.

This is a memoir but really reads like a collection of short essays or stories. It's from a time in the author's life where he's working on finding himself - as the title says, through bad jobs and poor decisions. It's very, very well written but the ending seemed abrupt - I'd definitely like to read more from this author.

I read this around the same time as J.D.Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy", and felt it made a good companion piece, with its tales of life on the breadline in contemporary America, and the things people do to make ends meet when living hand to mouth.
Helton jumps from shitty job (selling pumpkins at the side of the road that are the most expensive and lowest quality in town) to shitty job (low-skilled painter and decorator), blowing hard-earned crusts on drugs and alcohol to alleviate the mundanity of his difficult existence. At the same time, he's trying to maintain his relationship with his wife, who seems to actually be finding a way to climb the ladder up and out of their world, fearful that she will leave him behind.
This is another valuable insight into the world of America's forgotten millions, and provides further illumination as to how Trump got elected. Similarly to Hillbilly Elegy, I did get the feeling that Helton looked down on his former fellow grafters now that he has escaped his humbler beginnings, which didn't sit well with the overall tone of the book. Nevertheless this is a really interesting read.