HILLSIDE BOY

Beneath Mount Olympus, in a Latter-day Saint neighborhood in 1980s Murray, Utah, a boy turns a jungle gym into a spaceship, conducts the wind through funnels of yellow leaves, and half believes the mountain above his street is watching him back.

Brandon DeWitt grows up acutely alive to the world. And undefended against it. As embarrassment and disappointment accumulate through crushes and unanswered letters, burger-grill shifts and honors classrooms, tenderness begins to feel less like a gift than a liability. His longing turns strategic.

He learns to protect himself by becoming brilliant, disciplined, and hard to reach, collecting achievements while becoming harder to know. And one evening beneath the mountain, his imagination carries this retreat to its furthest edge: he strikes a quiet bargain for the confidence and presence he has longed to command.

What begins as an intimate portrait of boyhood gradually widens into a reckoning with memory itself: what we bury, what we trade away, and what refuses to disappear. Hillside Boy is a literary coming-of-age memoir about family, friendship, faith, first love, and the cost of self-protection: the story of a boy who buries his heart to keep it safe, and of the long walk back toward feeling.

Print length: 368 pages.