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. Fitzgerald’s lived many lives: He’s been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, and a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives – or so he was told. Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury Publishing) recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. His memoir-in-essays begins with a fast childhood that moves from safety to violence, and through trauma to self-understanding to, ultimately, acceptance. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco and smuggling medical supplies into Burma, Fitzgerald strives to take control of his own story, put aside anger, isolation, and entitlement, and embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others.