It's 1990, and thirteen year old Billy is trying to survive junior high, busted shoes, bad grades, family secrets, and the general humiliation of being a teenager.
But life at home is becoming harder to understand.
His father is increasingly convinced that the CIA, Big Brother, and mysterious forces are watching him. His mother is hiding secrets of her own. Strange phone calls, empty bottles, old suspicions, and a complicated family history begin to reveal a reality that Billy is too young to fully recognize.
So he does what any smart mouthed, pop culture obsessed teenager might do. He tries to make sense of it all through movies, music, cartoons, video games, crude jokes, wild imagination, and the unreliable logic of adolescence.
Set against the unmistakable backdrop of 1980s pop culture and the opening days of 1990, Trash Brand Billy's "Totally True Tale" of Teenage Tribulations, Vol. 1 is a darkly funny coming of age story filled with dysfunctional family life, teenage confusion, uncomfortable truths, and moments that are as absurd as they are painful.
Told through Billy's sharp, chaotic, and often hilarious perspective, the story explores what happens when a child begins to realize that the adults around him may not understand the world any better than he does.
Nostalgic, raw, irreverent, and unexpectedly moving, this is a story about growing up inside a family where truth is complicated, memory is imperfect, and sometimes humor is the only way to survive the things you don't yet understand.
Welcome to Billy's world.
The story is totally true.
Well... mostly.