Good Damage - by Trey Toler (Paperback)

About the Book

A Southern memoir about growing up wrong, losing everything, and discovering that not everything that breaks you is bad.

Book Synopsis

​​Good Damage is the debut memoir from Trey Toler about the messy, unscripted "after. " After the illness, the loss, the burnout, and the exhausting performance of recovery.

The story begins with a Southern childhood governed by rules no one explains: sunscreen and flip flops are gay, and umbrellas are for women. Trey comes of age as the boy who could never quite get those rules right, raised in a church where the preacher says homosexual the way you say abomination (slow, careful, like the word itself could spread).

At the heart of the story is his mother-her fierce beauty, her harrowing brain surgery, and her eventual absence. Trey explores the deafening silence that follows when the person who made the world feel safe is gone, and the strange, delayed grief that refuses to arrive-or leave-on schedule.

Instead of reframing the past with empty optimism, he writes from the messy space where many of us actually live - where learned survival habits start to limit our lives long after the threat is gone. The book channels the dark, earned humor of a stand-up comic who has learned that nothing pulls strangers into a room faster than the truth you didn't plan to admit. Good Damage lets loss, identity, and wit occupy the same space because that's how they actually show up in life.

A devastating and funny reckoning, Good Damage makes the case that not everything that breaks you is bad. Sometimes, that's exactly where the good stuff starts to grow.

Review Quotes

"Good Damage is a remarkable book about healing trauma with laughter and how dark humor can be the most illuminating part of us. Trey's story is unique and universal, hilarious, and insightful, inspiring, and evocative. I love!" - Margaret Cho, comedian and actress

"A candid and moving account that's buoyed by humor." - Kirkus Reviews

"Trey Toler's laugh-out-loud memoir Good Damage leans into the power of human connections." - Foreword Clarion Review

"Trey has a way of being funny about subjects that shouldn't be funny at all. How does he connect with readers on taboo subjects that we typically don't like talking about? He's unapologetically himself. He reflects on the scars of his own grief, with plenty of optimism about how we all can move past our demons-whatever they may be. Once you pick up this book, I guarantee you won't be able to put it down." - Jared Belsky, founder and CEO of Acadia and author of You Get the Agency You Deserve and The Great Client Partner

"Trey is the rare person who can make you laugh at something painful before you've even realized you're in it. Good Damage doesn't ask you to reframe your suffering - it asks something harder. Whether you've lost someone, lost yourself, or just lost the thread of who you were before everything changed, this book will find you." - Tim Andrews, radio host and producer of "The Popcast" on 955 WSB Atlanta

"Trey writes the way he performs: honest, funny, and completely fearless. He covers growing up gay in the South, an absent father, a mother's illness, and a world that handed him every reason to quit, yet somehow never lets it get too heavy to bear. By the last page, you feel everything he survived and the lightness he held onto through all of it. This one stays with you." - Marshall Chiles, comedian and owner of Whiplash Comedy