num_pages: 256
description: 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.
language: English
title: Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional
publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing