The memoir I didn't want to write

I thought my childhood and adolescence were normal, even after my mother died when I was seven, even after I was kidnapped twice by gangs (once at gunpoint), even after a priest used me as a boy toy for a year, even after I broke half a dozen ribs in a freak accident, even after I got a thousand dollars in debt to a Mafia-connected dentist, even after I found myself in a shootout in the bloodstained streets of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, even after all that, I thought my first twenty-one years were normal. It was decades later when I realized that … maybe … perhaps … well, they weren’t, which is why I wrote A Tipsy Fairy Tale, A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption. 

Looking back at my high school years I think of them as Early-Derelict Period. Mid-Derelict Period began when I kind of flunked out of three colleges in three semesters, than went to work at a bar so I could be near what I loved, and Late-Derelict Period commenced when I fled the United Stakes (See “Mafia-connected dentist” above) and returned to Wales, the country of my birth which I left as an infant. 

What held me together was poetry, which I started writing about the same time I started drinking. They were the only things that made sense to me. My poems were the usual “Woe is me” teenage schlock. I drank whatever I could get my hands on. However my journey as a young poet led me to find faith, both in myself and in something larger than myself, something audacious and luminescent that helped me rise from the ashes and give it another go. 

My story is not all gloom and doom. Terese Svoboda, author of The Long Swim, said A Tipsy Fairy Tale is “Sexy, witty, and often deadpan hilarious.” Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, agreed, calling it “A harrowing, hopeful, and unexpectedly funny book.” Jan Beatty, author of the memoir, American Bastard, wrote, “Surprisingly, this same voice brings a wealth of funny stories, offering us a way to be more human, more included.” 

I invite you to become “more included” as you get the dirt on my early life and learn how I went from “a boy going nowhere on alcoholism, a self-described ‘screw up’… to a young man full of poetry and promise” (Mimi Schwartz, author of Good Neighbors, Bad Times). You can order A Tipsy Fairy Tale at your local bookshop, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or online at McFarland Publishers (Save 35% using Coupon: holiday2024) or one of these other stores.