Isaac Fitzgerald on DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS
\u201cI wish I could tell you that I went to a cabin and wrote it perfectly and got it in on time, and it just flowed out of me. But really, the truth of the matter is, it came in fits and starts. And it was written on notepads and half-filled notebooks and phone apps and bar napkins\u2026.I grew up in a time of a lot of white men writing,\xa0Oh, my sad childhood\xa0stories. And so, my whole thing was\xa0I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that.\u201d Isaac Fitzgerald walks through the world with an open heart, and luckily for readers, he takes notes.\xa0Dirtbag, Massachusetts\xa0is his memoir-in-essays, and it covers plenty of ground, from his unconventional childhood and the librarians who helped change the trajectory of his life, to issues of class and code switching and complicated family dynamics, to the craft of writing and his literary inspirations. He joins us on the show to talk about all that and more, including a few things that didn\u2019t make the book\u2019s final draft, with Poured Over\u2019s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.
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Featured Books (episode)
Dirtbag, Massachusetts\xa0by Isaac Fitzgerald
Bad Feminist\xa0by Roxane Gay
The White Boy Shuffle\xa0by Paul Beatty
The Stories of Breece D\u2019J Pancake\xa0\xa0by\xa0Andre Dubus III, Breece D'J Pancake
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Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Running with Scissors\xa0by Augusten Burroughs
The Tender Bar\xa0by J.R. Moehringer
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Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays).
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A full transcript of this episode is available\xa0here.