BOOKMARKED
HOW THE GREAT WORKS OF WESTERN LITERATURE F*CKED UP MY LIFE

Mark Scarbrough has been searching for something his entire life. Whether it's his birth mother, true love, his purpose, or his sexual identity, Mark has been on a constant quest to find out who he really is, with the great Western texts as his steadfast companions. As a boy with his head constantly in a book, desperate to discover new worlds, he can hardly distinguish between their plots and his own reality. The child of strict Texan Evangelicals, Mark is taught by the Bible to fervently believe in the rapture and second coming and is thus moved to spend his teen years as a youth preacher. At college, he discovers William Blake, who teaches him to fall in love with poems, lyrics . . . and his roommate Alex. Raised to believe that to be gay was to be a sinner, Mark is driven to the brink of madness and attempts suicide. Hoping to avoid books once and for all, Mark joins the seminary, where he meets his wife, Miranda. Neither the seminary nor the marriage stick, and Mark once again finds himself turning to his books for the sense of belonging he continues to seek . . .

An examination of one man's complicated, near-obsessive relationship with books, and how they shaped, molded, ruined, and saved him, Bookmarked is about how we readers stash our secrets between jacket covers and how those secrets ultimately get told in the ways that the books themselves demand.