The Good Hand

‘After reading The Good Hand you may reassess whether you have ever truly done a hard day’s work in your life … This lyrical and engrossing memoir is an extraordinary tale … Smith writes movingly of his chaotic childhood … the tragedies slowly drip out … There have been predictable comparisons to other recent hardship autobiographies — JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover’s Educated — but Smith’s story, blessedly, comes with more (crude) humour … Undeniably powerful’Sunday Times

‘Thrillingly and wrenchingly funny … like Educated and Hillbilly Elegy, The Good Hand is one of those brilliant close-ups that suddenly flips to become a wide shot of the American moment. An engrossing combination of participation, reportage, self-discovery, and witness’David Lipsky, author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

‘Smith guides us through a long muddy year in North Dakota’s oil boom … It’s a surprisingly tender account of a man who is searching for salvation – from the sins of his family, from the drunken and drugged-up sins of a world broken by corporations – while trying desperately to find himself through work’Robert Sullivan, author of The Thoreau You Don’t Know

‘A sincere and colourful account of down-and-out men trying to make it and maybe grow up in the eternal dreary tailgate party and crushing dangerous toil of the fracking boom. As one of Smith’s mentors tells him, “now you know why gas is so expensive.”’William T. Vollmann, author of The Lucky Star

‘A thrill-read – There Will Be Blood made modern, and with added wit – The Good Hand is that rare literary treasure: all things, all at once. By mixing memoir with reportage and analysis, and telling his tale with rigor and joy, Smith gives us a hoot that also feels necessary’Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life

Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith is a writer and actor based in Brooklyn. His play about the iconoclast folksinger, Woody Guthrie Dreams, premiered at Theater for the New City in September of 2011. The Good Hand is his first book.