(typewriter dings) (upbeat jazz music) - My name is Isaac Fitzgerald, and this is "Dirtbag, Massachusetts."

It's the book that I wish I had when I was 14 years old.

I wanted to give a book that showed that it's okay to be introspective about yourself, in that I was raised on a certain type of masculinity that was very much just about toughen up, just stick to your guns, don't back down.

And so, that's what I started talking about.

It's a way of looking at masculinity, not through one lens, but showing that there's actually a huge range of all these different ways that we can be people.

- I love it that you call this book a confession, not a typical memoir.

I think it's a real act of bravery for a young writer like yourself to write a memoir because you've got a whole long life ahead of you for everybody to know your secrets.

- Knock on wood, knock on wood.

I'm hopin' I'm getting in the middle of it.

But for me, writing this memoir, writing an essay collection, it's the things that you don't wanna write about, the things you almost, that seem a little too hard to look at, that is where I often find the best material is going to be.

So when I started this project, it was supposed to be something completely different, and I kept writing, and all of a sudden, more and more my childhood would get in there, and I kept trying to get it out.

18 months later, I finally called my editor and I say, "Hey, I think this book might actually be "more about my childhood than I thought."

And my editor, Nancy Miller at Bloomsbury, wonderful woman, just responded, "Yeah, I've been waiting like 18 months "for you to figure that out."

- [Jeremy] Really.

- Yeah.

- Did it start off as a work of fiction, or was it still memoir?

- It wasn't fiction.

I just, the essay about the Hold Steady, that rock band that's in there, that's the best example of what it was kinda gonna be.

It was gonna be focused on pop culture with just like a little bit of me in there.

But the more I worked on it, the more I realized that I had something to say about the experiences that I've had, and it didn't have to be looking outward, it could be looking inward.

And that's when I realized I didn't wanna call it a memoir in essays.

Memoir didn't feel quite right either, 'cause it is a little bit broken up, and that's when I realized, oh, it's a confessional.

It's like I'm sitting there in the booth, saying something, confessing something, sharing something that I haven't really shared before publicly.

- And that is I think what makes it such a stark book is that from the very first chapter, there is this, you have an experience in your life that shaped your life, and we'll talk about that.

But I think that I too would've been like, "Hey, just so you know, "this needs to be a memoir just about your whole life."

You know what I mean, this is what you need to be doin'.

- Well, thank you.

- All right, so we've already talked about this, but an introduction to one of your first sections is one of the best sentences I've ever read.

"My parents met at divinity school, "which is a pretty funny way to start an affair."

So, it's such a raw act of writing, I think.

Did you tell your family and your friends you were doing this and when you did, how did they react?

- I mean, this is, it's all over the map with things like this, and this is a tough thing about making art.

Start with the lighter stuff, which is my friends were so supportive, and many of them, especially, like old friends from school, I reached out to them.

I showed them the parts they were in, and many of them were just like, "Yes, use my name."

Now, I've got other friends though that do other more adult things in life now, and so they were like, "I love it, please change my name."

And I totally understood that as well.

Family is more difficult, because I knew, we're already talking, it took me 18 months just to figure out how to get started.

This book came in past its due date, it came in past the deadline.

And so, I knew if I got caught up talking with my family about every little thing, it was just gonna be so many more hurdles to get over.

So I decided to work on the project and then show it to them at the end.

But the one thing I'll say, my mom wrote me an email.

I told her, I told her immediately, I said, "You don't have to read this for the record.

"We can just go about our lives.

"You do not have to read this."

She's a very smart woman.

She read it in a night.

She wrote me an email the next morning, and she just said, "I am so sorry."

And then, the next line, I think, was even more telling.

I mean, "I'm so sorry," I was probably waitin' to hear that my whole life, I didn't even know it, but the next line, she said, "I had no idea you were carrying this."

And that's when I realized that we had just been trying to get so far away from it and never talk about it that, of course, she had no, 'cause I would always try and put on my best face around her.

And then we had some really important conversations, and it's wild to say this, because there's some really hard stuff in this book, but my parents right now, the people that they've grown into, the people that they've matured into, are so loving and so supportive, and it's really brought us closer together.

- I love the word dirtbag.

- (laughs) Me too.

- It can take such a negative tone, but at the same time, it's almost a description of someone that is a great character.

- Mm.

- And so, I wondered where the title came from.

- Great story.

So my friend Jason Diamond, who's a wonderful writer in his own right, he has a wonderful memoir, look him up.

I was talking with him about what I wanted to title this collection, which is Athol, Massachusetts.

- Athol?

- I'll give you one, yep, one.

It doesn't, we don't need to say it, but it doesn't, you know what everybody else in the state called us.

And so.

- Of course, they did.

- I wanted to call it that, Massachusetts, and Bloomsbury, of course, was like, "You can't call a book that."

And so Jason, so simply, so like, without even thinking I just said that, and he just said, "Call it Dirtbag, Massachusetts."

Like, just threw it aside, and it's probably one of the best parts of the book.

It's such a good title, and he just handed it to me.

So I try to give him credit whenever I can.

- But were you offended when he was like, "Hey, this is gonna be about you" and ultimately, dirtbag is what the word is?

- No, no, because it's a very low income area in what is actually a very rich state.

And so dirtbag got at the essence of, when I say the other word, Massachusetts, that people could call us that, and we could be like hurt by it, or we could like embrace it.

- [Jeremy] Right.

- And we really embraced it.

- Tough question, but what's the hardest part of this book to write?

See, for me, I think it might be your first chapter, but I could be wrong.

- No, no, no, you're knockin' it out of the park.

It's the first chapter or first essay and the last essay.

And I can tell you that, because it was actually just one long essay that I eventually just split right in the middle, put it in the front, put it in the back.

I wanted to write a book that felt like a mix tape.

You can listen to one song, next thing's gonna feel a little different.

- Yeah.

- You can pick it up, put it down.

It's not one solid concept album that you gotta like get your whole evening ready for and just like, listen to it, man.

No, like, it's okay for it to jump around a little bit.

But I knew I wanted the beginning and the end to feel like they fit together, but that was all the family stuff.

And there's a lot of other tough stuff in this book, don't get me wrong.

There's a lotta tough stuff to look directly at, but this was the hardest essay to write.

And it was also the last.

I put it off, I put it off.

I wrote everything else in the book, and then I finally sat down and started writing a story that I'd been trying to tell probably since I was nine, 10 years old, certain aspects.

- Or even tell people.

- Exactly.

- I want to lift right from the intro, because I thought that this was, and I wanna make sure that I get.

This was it.

"But before all that, "he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives."

That's a lot to carry.

- Mm hm.

- But how much of that impacted your life?

- So I really thought of myself as a bad person.

I thought I was a bad person because I just knew that I was born into this world already causing problems, already causing trouble.

And especially I had two half siblings that were from their previous marriage.

Like, I felt like I had stolen their parents, the second I could even recognize, like realize that as a concept.

I felt a lotta guilt around that, so it turned me into this person that really didn't like themselves very much.

- And that's trauma.

Talk about trauma that has been with you your whole life, and so I'm hoping a degree of healing came from writing this.

- No, 100%, but I should give a shout out.

There's books, there's making art, so this book would not have been possible without three years of therapy that I did before it.

And I'm still in therapy, and I'm a big advocate for it.

I came to it far too late in life.

But if you have an opportunity to focus on your mental health, that is so so important, because for me, I mean, you're using the word trauma, and that's exactly right.

Trauma in my life was something I didn't even recognize.

I didn't even know I really had it, and so in a way it almost haunted me.

And I really mean haunted because it was invisible.

I really thought I was always doing the right thing.

I really did.

Only now can I look back and realize, oh, because of this, I was acting this way.

And it wasn't just hurting me, it was hurting people I loved around me.

- [Jeremy] That's right.

- And that's really hard.

- We'll talk about what men should embrace is therapy, and that's not some, that's a new concept.

- [Isaac] Yep.

- 'Cause our fathers.

- Oh, yeah.

- Our fathers wouldn't have said, "Son, you need to go to therapy."

- No, I mean, even my mom.

Like, my mother went to a clinic for a little bit, and that's in the book, and I explain it more eloquently than I can do now, but even then, I remember just being like, oh she's like in the loony bin.

It's like nobody's like, "Hey, no, she's going to work on her mental health."

And it's so drastic that like the state is covering it right now because that's how rough things have gotten.

- That's right.

And I hope to think we're in a different world now, where we don't have that stigma, but it is something.

- Oh no, yeah.

I mean, it's steps.

It's just, everything you're saying.

We're not there yet.

- We're not there.

- We're definitely not there yet.

- But we're getting there, hopefully.

- We have more language than we used to.

- So I wanted to ask you if you've always wanted to be a writer, because the sentence in your book that I really loved was that you considered literature a second religion.

- Yeah, yeah, and that was my parents, again, credit where credit's due.

They messed up a lot of things, but one thing they cared, they cared about Catholicism, and they cared about education, and they really really made sure that I grew up surrounded by books.

I was always in libraries, when we were living in inner city Boston, always in bookstores, when we had a little bit of cash to buy some.

When they moved, they used to throw their furniture out on the street, but the boxes and boxes and boxes of books, they always made it in the milk crate fills.

So I think that's part of it.

I gotta admit that, I have to admit that.

As much as a lot of this book was me running away from my parents, me being like, "I'm my own man now, I do my own thing."

Which is funny, 'cause part of that was goin' to California, and I'll never forget at one point I called them, I was just like, "Yeah, out here in California," like in my head I'm like, far enough from you as I could possibly get.

And they're like, "Yeah, I remember like in my 20s, "I went to California, get away from the folks."

And I was like, (laughs).

- And you were like, "Oh, come on, that's my experience."

- I'm supposed to be original, but, and you do, you recognize, especially, as you get older, the similarities that you have with your parents.

But no, I absolutely wanted to be a writer.

And part of that, I have to admit, it was, in a way, to try and communicate with them.

That's what they honored, so, of course, I wanted, in a way, their attention, right.

So, that's what it's rooted in.

But then I would argue the next thing that happens is that books were this way out, and I'm gonna butcher this quote, but it's from "History Boys," which is a brilliant play that was written in England.

And it's when you're reading a book, and you come across a line that you, it's an emotion maybe that you've only thought you felt, or maybe it's a thought that you thought only you thought, especially, when you're young, especially, when you don't know a lot of the world, and then you see it there on the page.

It's like a hand comes out and grabs yours, and it makes you feel less alone.

And so, it gets back to what I was sayin' earlier, my original want for this book is that a younger version of me has it stuffed in their back pocket.

That's all I'm trying to do right is try to communicate with a younger version of myself.

That's, once I realized books had that power, I was like I need to figure out how to do that.

And I'll be honest, I wasn't very good for a very long time.

(both laugh) - Of all the chapters in your life, from being an altar boy to a smuggler to a profession that we can't quite discuss on public television.

- No, gotta buy the book for that.

- You read this book, which chapter did you enjoy the most writing?

- Oh, that's such a wonderful question.

The true answer of that is a lotta my search was looking for community.

I grew up in a community as a young child, then we moved to this very rural lonely place.

I lacked that community, and I spent the rest of my 20s looking for community.

And the essay that I wrote about that job that we shall not mention, there's such a different way to do it.

There would be such a wooh, but instead, I really focused on the friendships and the bonds and the community that I found there.

And so that one, I had a lotta fun writing, and I got in touch with a lot of old friends that I worked with to make sure everything was okay and on the up and up.

And that felt really good to write.

- It is interesting, because that's what I took away from that essay was this whole feeling of community that we get whether we work in that industry or at McDonald's or in Congress.

- Exactly.

- It's all about the community that you find.

- Exactly.

- The problem with you, Isaac, is you're so much fun to interview.

You could just doing it.

You could just keep doing it.

- Let's keep going, Jeremy.

- Unfortunately, we're out of time, so thank you so much.

- Thank you so much, brother.

- It was so much pleasure.

- I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm Jeremy Finley.

And remember.

- Keep reading.

(typewriter carriage dings) - [Jeremy] And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

- [Isaac] Oh, I'm so sorry.

I thought you were like, "We're gonna do it on three, two, one," and then you were gonna do three, two, one.

Sorry, you thought I was a real pro.

I'm like a semi.

All right, go ahead.

(easy jazz music)