As If It Never Happened: Stories of a young boy’s secrets, fears, love, and loss

An emotionally driven story in the tradition of the best-selling memoirs, Running with Scissors and The Glass Castle, Patrick Knowlton’s As If It Never Happened is the moving and heartbreaking coming-of-age story of a child’s desperate struggle to make sense of an emotionally impoverished and chaotic existence. At a time when children are to be seen and not heard, we enter the mind of seven-year-old Patrick making his way among adults whose family secrets and instability leave him in a state of constant fear and uncertainty. From the wrong side of the tracks, literally, he is traumatized by constant bullying outside his home and unrelenting loss and isolation inside, where his absent father and sickly mother abandon him to the cruel whims of the adults who wander in and out of his life. Love is fleeting, security nowhere to be found.

In As If It Never Happened, Patrick Knowlton exquisitely captures the voice of his young soul, whose fortitude and deep faith refuses to be defeated by dark forces beyond his control.