Joe does not lead a charmed life. His mother commits suicide when he is twelve. His father and brother bond over their mutual athleticism, and leave Joe out. His brother manages to feel that bedding cheerleaders makes him a superior person and they never really manage to develop a good brother-brother relationship. Joe does have friends but they tend to be a bit on the margins, and one triad in particular goes terribly wrong. Joe hides at the time in his relationship with a girlfriend, but in the end he leaves home, and channels a fair amount of his anger into a book that he writes about the home town he grew up in and the people who inhabit it.
Joe puts a thin disguise on everyone, as much for legal reasons as anything else--but he wants everyone to know who they are and what they did, at least his version of it. The book gets published, it is a big success, and his home town in universally pissed off, for outing them to the world and for embarrassing them. No one thinks that what he said was actually true.
So Joe wisely stays away. For seventeen long years, during which his anger doesn't dissipate, nor does he make any effort to heal past wounds. So when his father abruptly has a stroke and Joe returns home to be at his side, he is bombarded by angry citizens and he hasn't really managed to move past his past either--so they are all kind of stuck there, with the bullies still thinking that they can use fists to win, and Joe not being able to show them differently. In actuality he and his brother are just as stuck in high school as everyone else. It is a sad book, a funny book, and a wise book. I very much like this author.
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