Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald
Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022) is a collection of biographical essays on self-discovery by Brooklyn-based writer Isaac Fitzgerald. These confessional stories explore the many facets of one man’s identity with warmth and honesty, painting a fascinating picture of rough childhood escapades and tentative debauchery.
Fitzgerald reveals layer after layer of his life throughout the essays: growing up in a dysfunctional family ("My parents were married when they had me, just to different people."); his experiences with faith and the Catholic church; his undying love for bars and drinking culture; a stint in a BDSM porn compound; how a search for purpose landed him smuggling medical supplies into Burma; and his never-ending battle with body dysmorphia. These elements provide substantial fodder for a series of books, and so the promise of a collection is intriguing.
Dirtbag, Massachusetts also sports perhaps the most star-studded endorsement quote line-up I’ve ever seen: praise from Roxane Gay, Min Jin Lee, Marlon James and Emma Straub crowd its cover, calling it “a revelation,” “a diamond of a memoir,” and “a wondrously crafted confessional.”
You’d be forgiven for having high expectations of groundbreaking revelations, especially for a book that promises to explore the possibility of “a more far-reaching vision of masculinity.” The material is there: a LOT has happened to Fitzgerald, and he approaches each chapter of his life with kindness and a genuine care for the truth. His essays delve into each of the above topics with honesty and nuance, unfurling a lifetime’s worth of mistakes, anger, and search for meaning. At their core, they are about what most personal essays are about: finding love, purpose, and understanding. And Fitzgerald’s journey to these goals is nothing if not fascinating.
“It’s strange – when you grow up in a house with your parents, when you go to church regularly, you’re supposed to feel safe in these spaces. To be safe. Except I hadn’t, and I wasn’t. I did find safety, and love, and friendship, and fun in a massive brick BDSM porn compound, the same way I did in bars and bookstores and in wandering the streets of the Bay Area. ‘The mad ones,’ as it turns out, are the people who will love you and care for you without judgement so long as you are deserving of it and you give the same back.”
However, where these essays come undone is in their lack of inter-connection and Fitzgerald’s lack of self-reflection. He recounts these stories without much real examination of himself, without actually doing the work that biographical essays like these require: understanding how certain events are placed both in his personal life and in the social landscape. Even stories like ‘Maybe I Could Die This Way,’ which recounts his stint volunteering with a Christian relief organisation in Southeast Asia and engages with the deeper implications of his presence in such a movement, only scratch the surface of the real issue at hand, and is therefore an incomplete examination of an otherwise nuanced and important topic.
The order of the essays could also have been laid out better. Fitzgerald chooses to reveal the most difficult parts of his childhood in the very last essay. He recalls his experiences with a suicidal mother who, left forlorn by a husband working (and cheating on her) in the city and by her disapproving parents slash neighbours, confides in her son in ways she shouldn’t, as well as instances of physical abuse and emotional terror from his father. While these memories are heartbreaking in general, they are rendered as an afterthought both by their very literal placement (last in the collection) but also by Fitzgerald’s lack of further insight. He mentions these almost for the sake of including them, and misses a great opportunity to really dig to the bottom of how these experiences have reverberated throughout his life. By placing this first in the collection, the reader would have felt differently about the events that follow in Fitzgerald’s life and the references which are only put into context by the very end. Without the right contextual framework to support his other essays about identity, these elements of his self seem to float in silos, and no grander resonance is drawn between them.
In all fairness, some essays were fascinating and well-written little wholes in themselves. ‘The Armoury’ recounts Fitzgerald’s experiences joining the porn industry and his tentative steps towards accepting his own body within a BDSM compound. This essay cuts through the others due to its originality and deeper connection to the undercurrents of Fitzgerald’s life. Here he also manages to do what is lacking in his other essays: to draw thought-provoking comparisons and insights that are rooted in his own childhood experiences and mirrored back in a surprisingly positive light in the porn industry.
“Imagine if violent homes came with safe words.
Everybody stop.
Hands on your head.
Quiet on the set, please.”
The goal of this collection is obvious and it is a kind, if ambitious, one: “to embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others.” There are certainly moments that approach this aim, and Fitzgerald is nothing if not sincere in his passions. At their cores, these stories reverberate his belief that:
“There are many ways to help, many ways to hurt, and many ways to do both, but there is no way to be perfect.”
And while the stories are definitely not perfect, they reveal an earnest man on a lifelong journey of bettering himself. Dirtbag, Massachusetts wasn’t for me, but it might be for you: the rebels, the bar hoppers, the ex-believers, the survivors of abusive childhoods – in other words, the dirtbags.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.