Guys Like Us: A Memoir of Life Lost and Found

On a Saturday morning, Mike Nolan, a hard-driving, hard-living lawyer in his early fifties, was hit by a truck during a 40-mile bike ride on New Jersey’s Route 35 and given up for dead. Instead, after months of recovery, Mike looked the same as he always had. The only difference? He had absolutely no memory. Guys Like Us, like a reverse memoir, is the attempt by his son, Sean, to tell Mike who he is through recollections of rare moments together and tales of the Nolan family on the Jersey shore. The Nolans, a clan planted in Ocean County by Mike’s father, Joe, are people who suffer no fools and take no prisoners; you had better wear thick skin when they are around. Three strong characters?Joe, Mike and Sean?dominate Guys Like Us. Add an enormous Cadillac that Joe and Sean bomb around in, Sean behind the wheel at the ripe age of eight. Stir in the boardwalks and beaches of the Jersey shore and near-lethal family feuds, and the pot boils. Sean Nolan does not fall far from the tree. It doesn’t take long for Sean to realize he has to tell Mike, among many other things, how impossible he could be. And that dark secrets, long held in a young boy’s heart, are out of reach to him forever. Giving his father back his memory, one funny, painful moment at a time, Nolan paints a poignant, often hilarious, portrait of their shared past.