South of Heaven (A Boyhood Broken)

For readers of The Basketball Diaries, Girl, Interrupted, Beautiful Boy, and Just Kids: A memoir of growing up, soaring, shattering, and recovering

Growing up in SoCal in the early 2010s, Nolan Trowe spent his early teenage years living largely on his own, exiled from his family, skateboarding and smoking and roaming the streets with friends. But one by one, he lost many of those same friends to suicide and overdose, while others vanished into different lives. At 22, while cliff jumping from a notorious hangout called Goliath, Nolan burst his L-1 vertebrae—causing a spinal cord injury that forced him to change his path, uncertain whether he would ever walk again.

In South of Heaven, Nolan Trowe tells his remarkable story, writing in a hurtling, unstoppable flow of words and images, music and memory, rage and desperation and love and yearning, about boys and girls surviving day to day on what they could scrounge, deal, trade, steal, earn, and learn from each other.

South of Heaven will resonate with the kids who were labeled fuckups, parents who lost a child to the opioid crisis, friends who lost friends too early, the skaters, the loners, the addicts, the artists, the children from broken homes–all the people who still find beauty, meaning, and fulfillment where it’s invisible to the rest of us.