Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

(Bloomsbury, $27)

“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,” said Michael Ian Black in The New York Times. Isaac Fitzgerald’s new memoir in essays is an “endearing and tattered catalog of one man’s transgressions”— including day drinking, drugging, scrapping, and briefly working in porn—while he struggles, as many men do, to make sense of himself. Fitzgerald has been prominent in the online literary world for more than a decade—serving as a co-founder of Rumpus and the founding editor of BuzzFeed’s books vertical. But he reveals himself here as belonging to a long line of “harddrinking but softhearted” male writers whose misbehavior makes for good reading.

This is a writer who’s “clearly as talented as he is tattooed,” said Zack Ruskin in

the San Francisco Chronicle. He opens by quipping that his parents “were married when they had me, just to different people,” and as he goes on to describe growing up in Massachusetts with a suicidal mother and philandering, abusive father, “he manages to handle these indisputably heavy subjects with clear-eyed, darkly humorous care.” He’s soon making trouble himself, yet even when he does good by joining a humanitarian group that’s smuggling medical supplies into Myanmar, he proves “more than willing to second-guess his younger self with ruthless accuracy.” Eventually, he finds a home at a San Francisco dive called Zeitgeist, and the bar becomes “all but a recurring character in the memoir.”

The book’s haphazard structure often obscures Fitzgerald’s emotional journey, said Stuart Miller in The Boston Globe. But the essays are often rewarding on their own terms. “The book’s highlight” is a 45-pager that initially describes a wake-up moment— when he survived driving 70 miles on a motorcycle while blackout drunk. That’s followed by a “riveting” account of his Myanmar adventure before a return to the motorcycle tale but with a twist. “Like every story in Dirtbag, Massachusetts, it’s one worth hearing, even if, like life, it’s sometimes messy and out of order.”