A respite came when he secured a scholarship to a venerable prep school thereafter the book thrums with ethical lessons accrued while navigating far-flung places. What followed were unsafe escapades filled with trauma, self-loathing, violence, and drunkenness. “I grapple with emotions in story form,” he says, “even if my life has been grappling in the dark.” Fitzgerald’s grappling took place in many disparate arenas:actual grapples, bloody and bruised, in a real-life fight club barbacking in a San Francisco biker dive erotic performing in pornographic films smuggling supplies to internally displaced peoples in Southeast Asia.įitzgerald grew up Catholic (his mother worked for Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston) and indigent, but he was not unhappy-until the ripe old age of 8, when his family moved to the country. Mistakes or not, they’re all deftly recounted with the care of a storyteller, and by book’s end, a tale of human grace emerges. Each chapter reaffirms the lesson of one of his favorite sayings: “Life’s mistakes are my co-pilot.” “While I’ve tried to live with intentionality,” says the gentle and genial author, “this book revealed that a lot of time I’ve just been…trying out different things.” That understatement captures Fitzgerald’s utter lack of grandiosity: In Dirtbag, Massachusetts (Bloomsbury, July 19), he exhibits a devilish derring-do tempered always by his natural modesty. If form follows function, then the traditional memoir could never contain the motley and multihued life of Isaac Fitzgerald, a frequent visitor on NBC’s Today showwho penned the bestselling children’s book How To Be a Pirate.
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