During the pandemic, I wrote a piece for The Guardian about starting to walk 20,000 steps a day, and wow. One is very simple, extremely simple, but it’s just walking. It became important to me to make sure that I was living a life that I was really interested in living, and so a lot of the things that I’m doing now have come out of that.

I think one of the things that came out of the pandemic is a lot of us facing mortality in ways that maybe not everybody was used to, and especially not day after day after day. And so, for me, that’s really been trying to take stock of what I want my life to look like, and kind of what’s important. But I do try to find those things that can buoy the spirit during rough seas. I think there’s an older version of myself who was such an optimist that I would be like, “But here’s the silver lining.” I think, through therapy, I’m learning that it’s important to just accept that things can be sad, things can be bad, that’s all right. ISAAC FITZGERALD: The phrase that I keep coming back to is “globally worried, locally okay.” It has been a hard couple of years for so many people for so many different reasons. SCOTT NEUMYER: How are you holding up? How are you doing after the past few years? Shondaland caught up recently with Fitzgerald to chat about writing his full truth, the joy of walking, writing during a global pandemic, finding pride in his work, finally discovering “a more stable joy,” and so much more. Fitzgerald has created a transformative experience for the reader that leaves them gasping for air long after they’ve put down the book. Reading Dirtbag, Massachusetts for the first time is akin to digging into an open wound, hoping to find the offending shard of glass and in the process learning that there’s far more beneath the surface. Throughout it all, he’s evolved, both physically as an innocent altar boy but also mentally as he grows to understand himself and his inner battles.įitzgerald’s confessional has a punk rock grittiness to it that sets it apart from the traditional memoir-in-essays in ways that are simultaneously unsettling and heartfelt, unflinching and loyal, and broken and mended.

With this memoir-in-essays, Fitzgerald traces a traumatic upbringing that included struggling with homelessness in Boston, making his way to San Francisco, and eventually ending up in Burma. That, however, has changed with the release of his latest book, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional. Despite years of storytelling, however, the best-selling author had yet to reveal his true self, warts and all, for the world to read. Isaac Fitzgerald has been in and around the literary scene for many years, telling both his own stories and heralding the stories of others in print and even on The Today Show.

The book dirtbag massachusetts