Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Memoir by Isaac Fitzgerald

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • USA TODAY BESTSELLER • Winner of the New England Book Award for Nonfiction • Winner of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Book of the Year"The best of what memoir can accomplish . . . pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy.” —Esquire, "Best Memoirs of the Year" Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives—or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self.Fitzgerald’s memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, accep