It is about the ways men struggle to make sense of themselves and the romance men too often find in the bottom of a bottle of whiskey. The fights nearly all come with forgiveness. The book’s charm is in its telling of male misbehavior and, occasionally, the things we men get right. In fact, aside from his mother and a porn producer and actress named Princess Donna, women are hardly mentioned in “Dirtbag, Massachusetts” the action is nearly all centered on the doings of men. It was everything and it was a lot of it.” It is there that Fitzgerald replaces the cheaper drugs he’d been doing at home with “pharmaceutical speed” prescribed by doctors, crushed with a school ID and affectionately nicknamed “Diet Coke.” “Dirtbag, Massachusetts” is a book by and for hard-drinking but softhearted men like these, and for those who take voyeuristic pleasure in their ne’er-do-well ways.įitzgerald’s own tawdriness comes with the pedigree of a private school education, after he was scooped up from a “town with the highest teenage pregnancy rate per capita in the state of Massachusetts” and given a free ride to Cushing Academy, “a place both soft and hard, cruel and kind. Fitzgerald nestles comfortably on a bar stool beside writers like Kerouac, Bukowski, Richard Price and Pete Hamill. Of course, there is no shortage of similar men in American literature. He describes his book as a “confessional,” although the only actual scene of confession we get is when young Isaac describes an early sexual encounter to an overly alert priest, who Isaac later suspects was masturbating while listening.įitzgerald is the author of the children’s book “How to Be a Pirate,” which tracks with his brazen tale. Some of us more than others, few of us as prodigiously and joyfully as Isaac Fitzgerald, whose new memoir, “Dirtbag, Massachusetts,” chronicles his upbringing as the accidental byproduct of sin between two divinity students his turbulent and violent childhood his years of drugging, day drinking, scrapping, bartending and acting in porn along with a sideline of missionary work in two Southeast Asian war zones. DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS: A Confessional, by Isaac Fitzgeraldįorgive us men, for we have sinned.
0 kommentar(er)
