The I Index

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

Maybe someday

42

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

9/100

Critics

74/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Isaac Fitzgerald

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Publishing

Date:

July 19, 2022

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. Fitzgerald recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self.

What The Reviewers Say

Zack Ruskin,
San Francisco Chronicle
... it’s the unpublished, unknown chapters of Fitzgerald’s life that make his new memoir resonate as a modern look at what it’s like to feel lost in America.
Stuart Miller,
Boston Globe
... introspective yet entertaining.
Michael Ian Black,
The New York Times Book Review
Fitzgerald nestles comfortably on a bar stool beside writers like Kerouac, Bukowski, Richard Price and Pete Hamill. 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.
Dorian Fox,
The Los Angeles Review of Books
This negotiation between received 'truths' and capital-T Truth is the work of every memoir, one could argue, but Fitzgerald’s project of openhearted self-interrogation still feels refreshing in a culture where men are socialized to bury their pain, or worse, turn it back on the world as misplaced resentment.