dirtbag massachusetts a confessional book review

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. 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.

Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 June #1 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.

Gritty and clear-eyed, loud-hearted and beautiful, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline.'-Book jacket. 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. 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.

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. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives-or so he was told. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England.

Dirtbag massachusetts a confessional book review