Blue Cypress Books Presents an Evening with Isaac Fitzgerald

NEW ORLEANS (press release) – Blue Cypress Books presents author Isaac Fitzgerald on July 23rd at 6:00pm.  Mr. Fitzgerald will be in conversation with Kristen Arnett as we celebrate the release of Mr. Fitzgerald’s memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional. The event will be hosted by Jami Attenberg and will have a High Life happy hour sponsored by Bloomsbury Publishing (while supplies last.) 

This event is free and open to the public and will take place at BJ’s Lounge, located at 4301 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, LA 70117. Copies of Mr. Fitzgerald’s book, “Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional”(July, 2022) may be purchased during the event. More about the event here.

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional: Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He’s been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives-or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self.

Fitzgerald’s memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, acceptance. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco, from smuggling medical supplies into Burma to his lifelong struggle to make peace with his body, Fitzgerald strives to take control of his own story: one that aims to put aside anger, isolation, and entitlement to embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others.

Gritty and clear-eyed, loud-hearted and beautiful, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline.

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: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Boston Globe and numerous other publications. His debut memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts, is forthcoming in July, 2022. He lives in Brooklyn. More info here.

Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and currently lives in Miami, Florida. More info here.

Jami Attenberg has written about food, travel, books, relationships and urban life for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. She is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up, and, most recently, a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Her work has been published in sixteen languages. Her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, was published in January 2021 by Ecco Books and Serpent’s Tail (UK). She lives in New Orleans, LA. More info here.

Blue Cypress Books is a local, woman-owned, New Orleans bookstore and has been a warm and welcoming place to find high-quality used and new books since 2008. BCB is an inclusive and welcoming place where we speak our minds and invite open conversations. They are proud members of the American Booksellers Association and the Southern Independent Booksellers Association, and are consistently rated as a top bookstore in the city. More info here.

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