Coming Soon at AQ Books

Some people leave New Jersey to find themselves.
Some of us just keep circling the Turnpike hoping Exit 7A finally feels like home.

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A story about growing up unseen in suburban New Jersey.
About learning how to survive before you ever learned how to speak honestly.
About grief, masculinity, silence, family, religion, queerness, late-night Turnpike exits, and the versions of ourselves we built just to make it home.

Set somewhere between diner coffee, Route 29 traffic, and the ache of becoming someone your younger self never thought you were allowed to be, The Boy from 7A is raw, personal, funny when it hurts, and painfully human.

This isn’t a clean memoir.
It’s a Jersey one.

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A New Author Is Coming to AQ Books.

There are parts of us the world gets to meet easily.
The polished parts.
The loud parts.
The survivable parts.

And then there’s the rest.

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The grief you never unpacked.
The love you buried.
The anger you turned into humor.
The loneliness hidden behind success, sex, work, performance, and pretending you were “fine” because fine was easier for everyone else.

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The Rest of Me is a deeply personal exploration of identity, loss, healing, masculinity, queerness, aging, and the quiet realization that surviving your life is not the same thing as living it.

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Raw, reflective, funny in places it probably shouldn’t be, and unafraid to sit in emotional discomfort, this is a story about what remains after the performance ends.

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Because eventually, you stop asking whether people loved the version of you they were given.

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And you start wondering if anyone ever knew the rest of you at all.

I didn’t go to therapy to heal.
I went because eventually even chaos gets tired.

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What started as “just talking” turned into unpacking grief, sex, masculinity, shame, power, loneliness, religion, identity, and every defense mechanism dressed up as a personality trait.

Turns out self-awareness is a little less inspiring when you realize you’re the problem and the narrator.

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Sharp, uncomfortable, darkly funny, and painfully honest, Therapy Wasn’t Ready for Me is not a guide to becoming better.
It’s what happens when someone finally stops lying to themselves long enough to tell the truth out loud.

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And honestly?
Some sessions should’ve ended with a warning label.

After the Life You Thought You’d Have

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He was supposed to get married.
Graduate.
Move forward.
Build the life everyone already believed belonged to him.

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Instead, he walked away from the future he had spent years rehearsing — not because he stopped loving her, but because something inside him no longer fit the life they were building.

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What Remains is a quiet, emotionally devastating novel about the aftermath of choosing honesty before you fully understand what the truth even is. Set between college campuses, empty apartments, late-night highways, and the suffocating expectations of adulthood, it follows a man unraveling the difference between performing a life and actually living one.

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This is not a coming-out story in the triumphant sense.
It’s a story about ambiguity.
About grief without villains.
About the terrifying freedom that comes after destroying the future you were supposed to want.

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Tender, restrained, painfully human, and written with the emotional precision of someone dissecting memory in real time, What Remains asks a devastating question:

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What happens after the life you planned for yourself quietly disappears… and the truth still hasn’t fully arrived yet?

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An Insider’s Story from the Republican Party Before the Closet Became a Window

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For years, the rule was simple:

Don’t ask.
Don’t tell.
Don’t make the party uncomfortable.

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So I learned how to survive in rooms where everyone knew exactly who you were — as long as nobody had to say it out loud.

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The Elephant and the Closet Door is an insider memoir about life as a gay man inside Republican politics before the culture wars became public theater. It’s about campaigns, power, silence, ambition, coded language, loyalty, and the impossible balancing act of building a career in spaces that only accepted you when you stayed useful and invisible.

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This is not a revenge story.
It’s not a political hit piece.

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It’s the story of what it felt like to live through a moment in American politics where the closet stopped being a door… and became a window everyone could suddenly see through.

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Some people left politics because they lost elections.
Others left because survival finally cost too much.

They whispered long before I ever spoke.

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About the way I lived.
The way I dressed.
The things I wrote.
The men I loved.
The grief I carried.
The confidence they mistook for arrogance.
The survival they mistook for performance.

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At some point, I stopped trying to outrun the noise.

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I listened instead.

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What They Whisper, I Will Own is a raw, unapologetic exploration of identity, reputation, visibility, masculinity, queerness, aging, grief, and what happens when you finally stop shrinking yourself to make other people comfortable.

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Part memoir. Part reckoning. Part middle finger wrapped in self-awareness.

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This is not a book about becoming fearless.
It’s about realizing people were going to talk anyway.

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So you might as well tell the truth louder.