dirtbag massachusetts a confessional book review

“I say you’re not done becoming yourself.” The result is a marvelous coming-of-age story that’s as wily and raunchy as it is heartfelt. Hes been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of. The beloved founding editor of BuzzFeed Books searches for a more expansive vision of masculinity in these remarkable personal essays-with life mistakes. “To any young men out there who aren’t too far gone,” he writes. It's the rare writer who reveals, and Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a heart on the sleeve, demons in check, eyes unblinking, unbearably sad, laugh-out-loud funny revelation.-MARLON JAMES, author of Moon Witch, Spider King. As he takes readers along on his search for salvation, he barrels through many venues-from San Francisco to Southeast Asia to Brooklyn to Kilimanjaro-recounting the “conversations that changed me” and eventually helped him overcome old ideals of masculinity and untangle his complicity in a racist society (in his case, “hipster racism”). things openly,” Fitzgerald buried his past in drinking, drugs, and porn: “bonding relationships,” he writes in “The Armory,” “were based on the consumption of porn and communal jerking off.” By his mid-20s, he was “on the other side” starring in pornos. In “Family Stories,” he charts the “stained and tattered map” of his dysfunctional Catholic parent’s lives and their bumpy road from “city poor to country poor.” A poster child of the “classic New England family, incapable of discussing. Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Review 'Isaac Fitzgeralds memoir-in-essays is a bighearted read infused with candor, sharp humor. Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline. In a series of essays, he recounts his impoverished childhood in 1980s Massachusetts and follows his escape from it through a litany of jobs and identities. Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald available in Hardcover on, also read synopsis and reviews. Journalist Fitzgerald ( How to Be a Pirate) weaves a raucous mosaic of a rough-and-ready New England rarely seen with a transfixing story of his path to finding himself.

Dirtbag massachusetts a confessional book review