Everything I Remember Wrong

Memory lies. It edits, flatters, blames the wrong people, and swears every time that this version is the true one. This collection takes that unreliability seriously - seven stories about the versions of the past we build for ourselves, and what happens when the present refuses to cooperate with them.

A man sleeps with the homecoming queen he's loved since he was a teenager, only to discover the years between then and now can't be undone by one night together. A freelance writer, drunk on deadline whiskey and an old cartoon's Cold War satire, tries to write something fair about a governor he can't stand - and fails on purpose. A forger takes on the strangest job of his career: steal a painting, replace it with a fake, and discover his client isn't the only one in the deal capable of a double-cross. A boy and his friends plot bloody revenge on the meanest dog in the neighborhood, and learn - the hard way, and at gunpoint - that older brothers make better enemies than dogs ever could. A man falls for a woman he meets at a Brewers tailgate while still dating someone else, and spends a Wisconsin winter finding out what he actually lost. A nine-year-old's entire Christmas comes down to one plastic action figure and a blizzard that swallows his hometown whole. And in the collection's longest, quietest piece, a marriage built on old friendship, bad jokes, and Jimmy John's subs is tested by grief, fatherhood, and a heart attack neither one of them saw coming - a love story about the kind of memory worth keeping exactly as it happened.

Set largely in Wisconsin and told in a voice equal parts wry, self-deprecating, and unflinching, Everything I Remember Wrong moves between comedy and heartbreak without ever quite choosing sides - the way memory itself does. These are stories about the lies we tell to survive our own histories, and the rare moments when the truth turns out to be better than the version we invented.