What if the moments you thought were lost never left you?
Brandon DeWitt grows up on Hillside Drive beneath the shadow of Mount Olympus, in a world of church pews, comic books, and playground kingdoms. In a culture that prizes obedience and the quiet ambition of becoming worthy, he learns early how quickly tenderness can turn to embarrassment, and how easily performance can masquerade as strength.
As he comes of age in 1980s and 1990s Utah, Brandon begins a steady ascent: academically, socially, and spiritually. He trades vulnerability for brilliance and mistakes distance for power. Yet as friendships strain, faith shifts and fractures, and first love becomes projection more than presence, he begins to sense the cost of what he has built.
What begins as a boy's fascination with mountains and wind slowly becomes a reckoning with memory itself: what we bury, what we bargain away, and what refuses to disappear. Threaded with recurring images of a chime in the wind and a cottonwood seed caught in air, Hillside Boy is a lyrical memoir of an interior life, revealing that imagination is not an escape. It is the only honest pathway back.
A memoir about the cost of becoming untouchable and the imagination required to feel again.