the Leaving Gene: Essays on Staying, Going, and Cost of Both

At fifty-two, Huck Smith has built a life that works. The bills get paid. The dog gets walked. The groceries get bought. And still, one question keeps following him: What does it mean to be someone who leaves?The Leaving Gene is a darkly funny, candid memoir-in-essays about the patterns we inherit, the relationships we abandon, and the strange moment in middle age when the life we carefully built starts asking questions of its own.Moving between family, friendship, sex, loneliness, aging, queer life, and the indignities of an ordinary Tuesday, Smith examines his instinct to leave without pretending he has finally conquered it. There is no tidy redemption here-only the uncomfortable recognition that sometimes survival skills outlive the thing they were protecting us from.Funny, profane, tender, and relentlessly self-implicating, The Leaving Gene is about what happens when you stop running long enough to ask whether the life you've learned to survive might finally be one worth staying for.For readers of David Sedaris, Samantha Irby, Melissa Febos, and David Rakoff.