Join ISAAC FITZGERALD—frequent guest on The Today Show and author of the bestselling children’s book How to Be a Pirate—for a discussion of his new book “Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional.”
BOOK DISCUSSION DETAILS
[In Conversation by SCAACHI KOUL]
Wednesday July 20, 2022 7:00 PM ET
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
More Details: https://www.harvard.com/event/isaac_fitzgerald/
About the Author:
Isaac Fitzgerald appears frequently on The Today Show and is the author of the bestselling children’s book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink and Knives & Ink (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
About the Book:
A TIME Best Book of the Summer
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the Season
A BookPage Most Anticipated Book of 2022
A Chicago Tribune Summer Pick
A Goodreads Readers’ Most Anticipated Books of Summer
A Buzzfeed Summer Book You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
A BookRiot Best Summer Read of 2022
“Any fool can confess. 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
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, acceptance. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco, from smuggling medical supplies into Burma to his lifelong struggle to make peace with his body, Fitzgerald strives to take control of his own story: one that aims to put aside anger, isolation, and entitlement to embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others.
Gritty and clear-eyed, loud-hearted and beautiful, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline.
