Instead, it is an endearing and tattered catalog of one man’s transgressions and the ways in which it is our sins, far more than our virtues, that make us who we are.NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER USA TODAY BESTSELLER Winner of the New England Book Award for Nonfiction 'The best of what memoir can accomplish. There is much sin in Fitzgerald’s confessional, although none of it mortal. If you’re looking for a book about what’s wrong and right with American men, you could do a lot worse than Dirtbag, Massachusetts. 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. 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. He writes about the bar with an affection that surpasses any he has for his former lovers, most of whom go nameless in the book.

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.

Read Full Review >įitzgerald nestles comfortably on a bar stool beside writers like Kerouac, Bukowski, Richard Price and Pete Hamill. Fitzgerald shows again and again that there is beauty to be found amid the pain, as hard as it can be to look. it is in celebration, not trauma, that Dirtbag, Massachusetts finds Fitzgerald tapping into his most vulnerable self. Fitzgerald is also more than willing to second-guess his younger self with ruthless accuracy. Whether writing about his struggles with body dysmorphia, his limited stint as an adult-film actor at San Francisco’s historic Armory building or how the two overlap on the Venn diagram of his life, Fitzgerald’s willingness to strip himself bare, both on the page and off, offers apt insight into why he chose to subtitle his memoir a 'confessional.' Connoting both religious overtones and Fitzgerald’s direct, heart-tattooed-on-his-sleeve brand of raw candor, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a confession in all the best senses of the word. manages to handle these indisputably heavy subjects with clear-eyed, darkly humorous care. it’s the unpublished, unknown chapters of Fitzgerald’s life that make his new memoir resonate as a modern look at what it’s like to feel lost in America.

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