By David Bagdon, Publisher
QUINCY – What began as a nostalgic tribute to growing up in Quincy during the 1960s and 1970s became a deeply personal, years-long quest for answers about an absent parent. In his new memoir, “Quincy Boy: A City of Presidents Memoir,” author and Fifty Plus Advocate Managing Editor Brett Peruzzi traces his coming-of-age in the city that shaped him—while uncovering the story of the father who wasn’t there to see it happen.
Era of rapid social change
Part family mystery, part portrait of a historic Massachusetts city in an era of rapid social change, “Quincy Boy” explores how place, memory, and longing intertwine. Peruzzi revisits the neighborhoods, schools, and granite quarries of his youth, as well as the cultural shifts that marked a generation. Along the way, his search for his missing father becomes a lens for understanding how family and community leave lasting marks on who we become.
“I set out to write about the place that shaped me,” said Peruzzi. “But I realized I couldn’t tell that story honestly and completely without confronting what was missing from it — my father.”
Finding his narrative voice
Peruzzi, now 64 years old, said he worked on the book for years, gradually finding his narrative voice as he delved both into Quincy’s history and his own family’s complicated story. He was raised by his conservative Italian-American grandparents after being born to their unmarried teenage daughter, and struggled with his sense of identity growing up and into his young adulthood. “I didn’t really feel like I fit in with my family growing up,” he observed.
He grew up in a warm, nurturing household with his maternal grandparents, and had a close relationship with his mother, who lived only a block away with her husband and his three half-siblings. But he felt the stigma of having a different, absent father from his mother’s previous relationship, a man his family refused to talk about. “I felt like an outsider who had been dropped into a so-called ‘normal’ family,” he recalled. “My grandmother would tell people I was ‘nervous,’ and ‘shy,’ but the truth was I suffered from anxiety from an early age, and tried not to draw attention to myself, because I was so self-conscious.”
He said as he entered his teens his sense of disconnection grew, far beyond the usual adolescent alienation. Eager to fit in with his sometimes reckless neighborhood friends in Quincy, he began using alcohol and marijuana to reduce his anxiety, and engaging in other risky behaviors. These including jumping from high cliffs into Quincy’s abandoned, water-filled quarries, and hanging out in Boston’s adult entertainment district of the 1970s, the Combat Zone.
Growing disenchantment
Peruzzi eventually found validation in Boston’s emerging punk rock scene, where being different was celebrated rather than avoided. “It was an outsider culture,” he explained. “After years of trying to fit in, my concerns about that evaporated. I went out of my way to be different, in the way I dressed, wore my hair, the records I bought, and the bands I went to see.”
In college, as his view of the world became wider, he also became increasingly disenchanted with his hometown, where violence and racism sometimes unfolded on its hardscrabble streets. “There was a narrow-mindedness at times that I wanted to distance myself from,” he said, of his decision to leave Quincy after college for other communities south of Boston.
Years later, a series of family crises drew him back to Quincy. He experienced many painful revelations as he lost family members, uncovered more family secrets and his first marriage ended. Eventually, he also unexpectedly found the father whose absence had haunted him for so long, and he achieved a degree of healing and acceptance.
A longtime freelance journalist and technical writer, Peruzzi’s creative writing has also been widely published. His poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, Ovunque Siamo, Exquisite Corpse, Modern Haiku, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Boston Poetry Magazine, and Amethyst Review, among other publications. A graduate of Bridgewater State College with a bachelor’s degree in English and Northeastern University with a master’s degree in technical and professional writing, he now lives in Framingham.
“Quincy Boy: A City of Presidents Memoir” is available in paperback and as an e-book on Amazon and the website of Silver Street Media, a Massachusetts-based small business, and at The Next Chapter Books and More bookstore in Quincy.
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