• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 June #1
  To get a sense of the life Fitzgerald limns in this thoughtful collection of personal essays, consider some of these sentences: "I had been drinking and doing drugs since I was twelve;" "I was committing low-level health insurance fraud;" "I loved bars from the moment I first drank in one at fourteen;" "the first time I thought about killing myself, I was maybe ten or twelve." As all of these suggest, Fitzgerald has had a, well, colorful life. For starters, he had a horrible childhood in Massachusetts, which he escaped, at least in part, when he received a full scholarship to a tony eastern boarding school. He's spent his life since toggling between coasts, mostly in New York and San Francisco, where his favorite bar, called the Zeitgeist, is located and where he worked for several years as a bouncer. It was also in San Francisco that he appeared in pornographic films. But he is now, at 38, a fine and compelling writer, as these vivid essay evidence. All that's missing is a piece about his becoming a writer. Maybe next time? Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.

Isaac Fitzgerald appears frequently on The Today Show and is the author of the bestselling children's book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink and Knives & Ink (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.