MacDonald's first book told of the loss of the author's four siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston's Irish-American ghetto. The question "How did you get out?" has haunted him ever since. This narrative of reinvention begins with the young MacDonald's first forays outside the soul-crushing walls of Southie's Old Colony housing project. In greater Boston and eventually New York's East Village, he becomes part of the club scene, providing a 1980s social history and a powerful glimpse of what punk music was for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. Yet family tragedies eventually draw him home again, to a devastating breakdown induced by trauma and guilt. He meets his father for the first time, as a corpse. Finally, two trips to Ireland, the first as an alienated young man, the second with his extraordinary "Ma," are healing journeys unlike any other in Irish-American literature.--From publisher description.