Having left Sherry for Jackie, Gardner finds that outside of the bedroom, they are poorly matched. Gardner feels an instant bond with his son, as though he knew him “from a previous lifetime” (176). The most significant of these is Jackie, with whom he enjoys a voracious sexual relationship resulting in his son, Christopher. He craves a wilder life and seeks out the distraction of other women. Marriage is the wrong choice for Gardner, who finds the institution “too structured, too orderly, too rigid” (163). While Gardner is stimulated professionally, he feels a void in his personal life, so, on impulse, he resumes contact with Sherry Dyson. Learning as much as he can on the job, Gardner publishes in prestigious medical journals and entertains hopes of becoming a doctor. Gardner is then invited to San Francisco, to become the assistant for a pioneering heart surgeon, Robert Ellis. Instead of seeing the world, as he intended, he is stationed at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, where he gains medical training. They embark on an on-and-off, long-distance relationship, when Gardner joins the Navy.

He also has his first romantic and sexual experiences and falls in love with Sherry Dyson, a woman from Virginia. He is an avid reader, goaded on by his mother’s sentiment that “the most dangerous place in the world is a public library” and vows to be a better man than Freddie or his abandoning father (25).Īs a teenager growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution, Gardner gains a sense of himself as a young black man coming of age in a transformative historical period. Gardner grows up with a deep fear of uncertainty, but he is also quick, curious and daring. They all grow to loathe Freddie and, in the instances, that Bettye Jean tries to leave him, he finds some means of reporting her to the police, and the children stay with their uncles and aunts or with foster parents until her release.

The life of chris gardner