Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald

256 pages

Published July 2022 by Bloomsbury USA

Publisher's Summary: 

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.

My Thoughts: 

I came to this book in an unusual way. Fitzgerald was on The Today Show just before Christmas last year, making gift book recommendations, and recommended a book by George Saunders. You would think that would point my in the direction of Saunders' book; but I didn't need that nudge. Instead I saw an author I'd never heard of before recommending a book by an author I like. If we have the same taste, maybe I'll like the book Fitzgerald wrote, I reckoned. So I requested it from the library with only the idea that it was a memoir. 

"My parents were married when they had me, just to different people. That's the way I open every story when I'm asked about met childhood. I was a child of passion! A happy little accident. Or, put another way, I was born of sin: a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents' lives."

Eventually Fitzgerald's parents left their partners, and the children they had with those partners, and married each other. In the beginning, they were poor, relying on both of their jobs and the charity of a Catholic charity to survive. But they did survive. Until they didn't. Until it was decided that Fitzgerald and his mother would move to a small town, next door to the parents who had chased his mother away because of her marriage to his father. She was miserable there, her parents made things worse, and her marriage began to crumble. A bomb went off in Fitzgerald's parents' lives but it wasn't Isaac, it was their own doing. And it was Isaac who suffered the greatest damage. 

Within four years, Fitzgerald was drinking, doing drugs, and stealing. He stole pornography and sold it to other young teenage boys, he stole cars to joyride, he became part of a fight club. He was saved, in a manner, when he was accepted on scholarship, to a boarding school. It was a first step to pulling himself out of the hell he was living in but it was a very long time before he would come near to being healed. 

This collection is not an easy read. Fitzgerald spent a lot of years drinking far too much, becoming a regular at a lot of bars in San Francisco, including one that would become his workplace for a number of years. Making ends meet was always a struggle; at one point, Fitzgerald even performed in pornography. But in that struggle, Fitzgerald finally discovered himself and learned valuable lessons and skills that would help him find his way back to his family. In the bars, he made friends who he would keep in his life long after he no longer lived in San Francisco. The porn industry taught him that open communication is vital and that maybe families should have inviolable safe words to stop them from harming each other. 

Fitzgerald's live isn't one that I can readily relate to; still, there were things he had to say that rang true to me. 

"Look. Not everything ages great, our own parts most unattractively of all. When you look back over your history, I'm sure it's not just glimmering perfect accomplishment after glimmering perfect accomplishment. If it is, then...good on you and I wish you a happy life, but I personally wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you (which, given the whole aging thing, isn't very far these days)."

Fitzgerald doesn't hold back in this collection and he makes no apologies. He doesn't try to make us believe he's got it all figured out now. He's never entirely stopped drinking too much. He's still working on figuring out why he blames his mother more than his father for the pain in his past. And he's still working on forgiving both of his parents. But he and his half siblings have created a family unit in which all of the disparate parts have figured out how to work. 

One of my favorite sayings is, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." That's exactly what Fitzgerald's been doing all of his life. In that way, I certainly can relate to him.