The Many Lives of Isaac Fitzgerald
THE AUTHOR OF DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS TELLS IT LIKE IT IS
By Dan McCarthy
From the pages of our August 23 Issue.
IN ISAAC FITZGERALD’S bestseller Dirtbag, Massachusetts, something resembling the standard memoir approach of recanting a formative experience and then using it as an observation of one’s life later in the story is laid out for the reader.
MADDIE MCGARVEY
Recalling his return home to rural north central Massachusetts from boarding school, accompanied by some friends traveling with him, Fitzgerald was among a rogue’s gallery of misfit young men masquerading their machismo as youthful inner strength (as they do). Eventually, they find themselves mixing with his hometown buddies with river canoe races, heavy drinking, and general run-ins with the law. It is the beginning of a story plot that often leads one to their destiny, or inversely, the beginning of the hero’s metamorphosis (because we are all heroes in our own stories). In its most basic form, it’s a narrative device to set up growth by using present-day reflections on past bad decisions. Wisdom will come with the passage of time and distance from the events.
“I got my ass beat, dried blood and bruises on my face lingering the next day,” he writes in Dirtbag, Massachusetts, only later to reveal that he was beaten bloody while slumped over a member of the party platoon named Terry, a fellow theater club kid who was small and only came up chest high on the young Fitzgerald. “I found myself collapsed over Terry, not so much defending him as taking his licks for him. The fists and kicks hitting my face and ribs seemed to last forever, until some more friends joined the fray and fought the other kids back into their cars.” It’s an engaging, colorful scene, in line with the acerbic style and declarative prose marking the rest of the book. Fitzgerald quickly reveals that the kid was in the wrong and had acted indecently to a girl, thus igniting the battle of the boys. “He was a total fucking creep whose beating I had taken for him. I felt sick.”
That’s it. No greater redemptive plot point, no elder version of himself editorializing the moment or making excuses for it. No callback lesson learned or righting of some wrong, to then be applied later in life for a satisfying arc or character creationism. It’s just a thing that happened, the memory of it, a bit of authorial perspective that comes with time, distance, and maturity, and then on to the next moment worth recalling (of which there are plenty). In short, it’s like life: Things happen, you experience them, and then you keep going.
It’s apropos of the book’s rawness and unflinching warts-and-all reflection, as Fitzgerald’s life story jumps through his years with the crispness of an Amy Hempel short story. But the mosaic world-building and recalling of personal history result in an unflinchingly rough-life memoir via essays with a deeply personal narrative through line, sans the normal moralizing and extraction of salient tutelage of the human experience. Be it growing up in a homeless shelter in Boston, bartending in San Francisco, smuggling medical supplies into Burma, body dysmorphia issues, working and modeling in porn—it all leads him to look inward to reach a place of self-acceptance and even forgiveness. At some point, that extends to his parents, whose original sin of having Fitzgerald out of wedlock and blowing up both pre-existing families haunts him in latent and manifest ways. All of it is here, essay by essay, and all by the guy most of middle America knows as the ebullient and tattooed passionate book hound enthusiastically recommending on The Today Show the latest books to read.
“There’s a pathos you can recognize in the book that is a constant draw to community—whether it’s service of a community or finding yourself in the community of others like you, and that’s a very human desire to be around like-minded people,” he tells me on the phone from his apartment in Brooklyn. “I’ve been drawn to all these different versions of community because I was almost, in a way, trying to recreate that love I felt growing up, which is such a weird way to put it when I started out in a homeless shelter.”
It all began in the woods when his parents, who were married to different people at the time of his inception, became the spiritual center of the tapestry of people floating in and out of scenes in his life. It’s a funhouse-mirror recollection of years under a darkened cloud, which gave rise to his self-anointed moniker, “The Bastard Prince of New England.” When you are born to philandering parents hailing from a Boston Catholic socialist commune (his mother worked with the notorious Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop who resigned in disgrace during the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal), simply exposing one’s life in this book has the effect of deconstructionism of the self—as if Jacques Derrida was Fitzgerald’s personal therapist coaching him to catalog and later look through and beyond the salient moments to a gritty, loud, swollen-heart book of life.
Fitzgerald’s essay collection and lyrical life sonnets feel ready-made for a big-screen adaptation. If one needs a barometer of how the masses may respond to his rowdy tales, one can just watch Fitzgerald telling Hoda Kotb why he felt like his introduction into the world was a bomb that went off and destroyed two different families before he was ever told by his mother he should have been an abortion. Her furrowed brow and eyes shrink-wrapped in tears reflect the soul of the reader, placing themselves in that bum-deal of an early hand one can get dealt and wondering how they would have fared if given the same start in life.
“I never figured out how to even talk to my parents about so much of this,” he says. “I knew from a writer’s perspective that if I started showing them the manuscript, it would become this never-ending conversation and the book would probably never get done.”
Things just happen in this story and then you move on to the next thing, because you don’t have a choice. In spite of searching for forgiveness and defining self and family and the other themes explored in his collection, Fitzgerald understands that the clock is always running even when you’re not watching it. In other words, decide what you want to deal with and how, and when it gets to be a little too much, write it down and work it out on your own (or with a therapist) when you are ready. “Give people a chance to surprise you, especially people that are in your life that you love and care for,” he tells me. “That’s what happened in my case.”
Dave Eggers, the poster child for bestselling memoirs of the previous decade and founder of 826 Valencia, where Fitzgerald has spoken and tutored youth writers, had a conversation at a recent event in Boston where this kind of approach was mentioned. (It was also captured on Fitzgerald’s Substack, walkitoff.substack.com.) “Art has to be absolutely free,” Eggers said. “Very often we cage what we love. We take a beautiful wild animal and put it in a cage where it’s no longer itself. We do the same thing with art.”
Nobody can accuse Fitzgerald of caging anything worth being freed from his own story. The bestselling children’s book author and contributor to The New York Times, Guardian, Boston Globe, and others took six years to write Dirtbag, Massachusetts, most of it assembled over the pandemic’s beginning days, with a few essays written earlier and reworked for the collection. Writing this book any earlier in his life would not have worked.
“I’ve been trying to write some version of this since I was 23,” he says. “I was lucky in that I did a lot of journaling when I was younger. Fifteen to 20 years of wrestling with these concepts and these ideas and these feelings and memories gave me a lot of time to put into this.”
And how. Fitzgerald says his mother’s response to the rawness of the book and his memories of growing up helped heal him. (“She had no idea I was carrying all this with me all these years,” he says.) He posits that the truth, for anyone, is a whole block of wood waiting for a set of hands to shape it out of the raw material into a true form.
“The statue to come from that block of wood will look different depending on who is doing the carving and polishing,” he says. “After all, you can’t put everything in a memoir; it would likely be too boring.”
Boring wasn’t an issue with the material he had to work with, given his life’s trajectory. Instead, for Fitzgerald, it’s about finding the moments you want to highlight and then realizing you got it wrong back then. For him, it’s the fun and the most brutal part of writing a confessional collection like this—going through old emails and realizing you weren’t what you thought you were putting out in the world. He says one of the things he hears most about the book is that it wasn’t what readers had anticipated. His essay about dabbling in porn is both human and humorous without being judgmental, and that’s the one most say they thought he’d lose them on. Instead, it was one of the most loving and fair-handed perspectives in the collection.
“As humans, we are storytellers, and as a species, sometimes we get things wrong in memory,” says Fitzgerald. “At our core, we’re all trying to figure things out, and that’s where the art is in my opinion. I gained so much empathy for my parents and what they were going through while writing this book. Part of that was me recognizing that their childhoods were probably also pretty messed up. If you look hard enough, all parents have a hard time. Mine were no different; it’s just that when you are a kid, time is so slow and everything happening to your entire world through those years is just a bad couple years for your parents, doing the best they can.”
Isaac Fitzgerald will be in conversation with Saeed Jones on “Memoir and Memory” during the Authors Guild Foundation’s 2nd Annual Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival, September 21–23. You can also catch Fitzgerald on Thursday, August 3, at 6 p.m., for a reading and conversation in the newly launched R&D Store at MASS MoCA. authorsguild.org/event/wit-festival
massmoca.org/calendar
Some Words on the WIT Festival
What could a community that has everything—the performing arts, world-class dance, rich culture and literary history, museums and galleries galore, natural beauty, intellectual heritage—possibly need? The Berkshires is so rich in creative people and outlets, it would seem there is not one day in the calendar to support another offering. But when the Authors Guild Foundation was looking for a home for an ideas festival, the Berkshire community said, We need that here! In fact, a number of individuals and organizations were thinking seriously about an Aspen-like Institute, where important issues of the day could be explored with experts on the cutting edge of science, technology, medicine, as well as stories that connect to our humanity, seek truth, and reveal new insights about our world. They helped the Authors Guild Foundation build the Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival, and here we are in year two.
The Theme this year is “Changing the Narrative,” and from Thursday, September 21, to Saturday, September 23, over 20 journalists, historians, poets, novelists, biographers and technology experts will take to the stage at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox for nine stimulating conversations. Topics will range from AI, cryptocurrency, and the oxycontin crisis to how fake news helped foment rebellion in 1765, just as it did in January 6, 2021. Mrs. Dalloway, the unreliability of memory, the power of male friendship, time travel, and Native American stories will also be explored.
For a cost, there are also dinners every evening with authors and others at Stonover Farm’s Barn on opening night, and private homes the next two nights. Proceeds help support the festival.
Registration opened Monday, July 17, for sponsors and the members of our Giving Society and to the general public on Monday, July 31. We invite you to help support WIT through a sponsorship which has numerous benefits, such as tickets to every dinner, early access to registration, and recognition in our program and during the event. Or donations of any amount help keep access to the festival open to everyone. For more information, go to authorsguild.org/wit-festival. And see you at the WIT Festival!
—Lynn Boulger,
Executive Director of the Authors Guild Foundation
WIT 2023: Changing The Narrative
Thursday, September 21
5 p.m. Jane Smiley in conversation with Jennie Kassanoff • Politics and Prose
Friday, September 22
10:30 a.m. Margaret Verble in conversation with Morgan Talty • Who Are NDNs, Anyway? And Why Does It Matter?
1 p.m. Jonathan Taplin in conversation with Mary Rasenberger • The End of Reality: A.I., Crypto, and the Metaverse
3 p.m. Emma Straub in conversation with Maya Shanbhag Lang • Parents on Paper
5 p.m. Rita Dove in conversation with André Bernard • Playlist for the Apocalypse
Saturday, September 23
10:30 a.m. Michael Cunningham in conversation with Roxana Robinson • Mrs. Dalloway at 98
1 p.m. Isaac Fitzgerald in conversation with Saeed Jones • Memoir and Memory
3 p.m. Patrick Radden Keefe in conversation with Daniel Zalewski • The Cult of Secrecy
5 p.m. Martin Baron in conversation with Stacy Schiff • The Present, the Past, and the Historical Record