December 1, 2021
Founding editor of BuzzFeed Books, Fitzgerald grew up in a homeless shelter, once helped smuggle medical supplies into Burma (now Myanmar), and worked as a fireman and on a boat before leaping into New York's literary world. He's also written the best-selling children's book How To Be a Pirate. He proclaims that "life mistakes are my copilot" and here puts his copiloting on display while also recommending a larger view of masculinity than the anger, isolation, and entitlement he's seen defining his gender. With a 100,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 15, 2022
Down and out in rural Massachusetts, San Francisco, New York City, and Burma. For a stretch in his 20s, Fitzgerald worked at an iconic biker bar in San Francisco called Zeitgeist. When business was slow, he read paperbacks from the used bookstore down the block. "All the big drinking books, by big loud men....Life could be tough," he writes, "but it could also be the stuff of legend. Maybe I could write legends of my own, even though I was often too drunk to write anything down." The author begins this collection of personal legends with a line that he's been using for decades: "My parents were married when they had me, just to different people." What's more, they met at divinity school. In urban Boston, where his mother worked for the Catholic Church, the author experienced a happy but poor childhood. When he was 8, they moved back to the country, and "everything went to shit." Fitzgerald's anger and despair about the violence and chaos of the years that followed are so deep that they form a kind of bass line to the text, carrying through to the end. In between, the kid racked up some legends. "The True Story of My Teenage Fight Club" is exactly what it sounds like, as the author describes the Fight Club-inspired group that got him and his buddies through the last years of the 20th century. In the title essay, Fitzgerald chronicles his escape from his unpromising hometown for an elite boarding school. "Maybe I Could Die This Way" is about his stint volunteering with a Christian relief organization in Southeast Asia. "The Armory" describes the author's employment in the porn industry, where he learned a lot about honest communication--which leads him back to his childhood. "Imagine if violent homes came with safe words," he muses. Fitzgerald unearths inspiration from dirtbags of all shapes and sizes, sharing it with sincerity and generosity.
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Starred review from April 18, 2022
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. 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. 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... 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. 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”). “To any young men out there who aren’t too far gone,” he writes. “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.
June 1, 2022
To get a sense of the life Fitzgerald limns in this thoughtful collection of personal essays, consider some of these sentences: "I had been drinking and doing drugs since I was twelve;" "I was committing low-level health insurance fraud;" "I loved bars from the moment I first drank in one at fourteen;" "the first time I thought about killing myself, I was maybe ten or twelve." As all of these suggest, Fitzgerald has had a, well, colorful life. For starters, he had a horrible childhood in Massachusetts, which he escaped, at least in part, when he received a full scholarship to a tony eastern boarding school. He's spent his life since toggling between coasts, mostly in New York and San Francisco, where his favorite bar, called the Zeitgeist, is located and where he worked for several years as a bouncer. It was also in San Francisco that he appeared in pornographic films. But he is now, at 38, a fine and compelling writer, as these vivid essay evidence. All that's missing is a piece about his becoming a writer. Maybe next time?
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June 1, 2022
Fitzgerald's parents were married when they had him--just not to each other. And so begins this tenderhearted memoir in essays about the ripple effects from his difficult childhood and how they have affected the man he is and the man he is still becoming. The confessionals of his life are delivered as if from a stranger sitting next to readers while they have bellied up to the bar. His story begins living in a socialist Catholic charity house in Boston, catching games at Fenway with his dad in the standing room only seats. He comes of age in Massachusetts: reenacting scenes from the movie Fight Club with his friends, grappling with bad body image, discovering the band the Hold Steady, and eventually finding a home away from home working in a bar in San Francisco. VERDICT Fitzgerald's stories are introspective and exude self-awareness. Readers will leave with a true soft spot for him.--Erin Shea Dummeyer
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.