Small Town Has-Been

"I'm fine" was the sentence Scott Wiederhold reached for instead of every other sentence he needed to say, the one most men learn to use instead of talking about what they're actually feeling. He learned it early, losing his best friend at sixteen and growing up with a father who chose not to show up.

Then came one phone call, before he'd even taken the woman who'd become his wife on a real date, when he told her everything he'd been told was wrong with him, instead of staying silent. She didn't reject him. That's where the silence actually broke, not on the last page of this book but in the first year of their story. He decided to speak up instead of shutting down.

What came after tested it harder than anything before. Twenty-five years trying to become parents, two failed rounds of IVF, and a near-adoption that closed for good on the chance that felt closest. Small Town Has-Been is not the story of a man staying silent through all of that. It's the story of a man who'd already chosen to speak, having to choose it again and again: the invisible grief of infertility from the man's point of view, the culture that never checks on the guy in the waiting room, and a marriage that held because two people kept talking instead of performing.

Scott spent most of his life mistaking silence for strength. This book is what it looked like to finally stop.

A man's memoir on infertility, adoption, grief, marriage, and manhood, for the men who go through this in silence and the people who love them.