dirtbag massachusetts by isaac fitzgerald

MASS MoCA’s new Research & Development Store (R&D Store) combines gallery and retail space focused on exhibiting, producing, and procuring affordable contemporary artist editions and books of the highest quality. It’s a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline. Gritty and clear-eyed, loud-hearted and beautiful, Dirtbag, Massachusetts has seen accolades from Time, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco, from smuggling medical supplies into Burma to his lifelong struggle to make peace with his body, Fitzgerald strives to take control of his own story: one that aims to put aside anger, isolation, and entitlement to embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others. Fitzgerald’s memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, acceptance. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives-or so he was told.

He’s been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England.

“The best of what memoir can accomplish… pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy.” – Esquire, “Best Memoirs of the Year” Join us for a reading and conversation in the newly-launched R&D Store.

Dirtbag massachusetts by isaac fitzgerald