Not My America: A Stranger in My Strange Land

He grew up on a road called Division. That turned out to be the whole story.

CD Damitio came back to America after five years living abroad — married to a Moroccan woman, father to a young daughter, ready to believe the country he’d left might still be the one he’d imagined as a kid reading about Daniel Boone in a treehouse in the Oregon woods.

It wasn’t.

What followed was a decade of reckoning: squatting in a foreclosed house in Sacramento, scraping by in rural Oregon, watching a small American town turn ugly in real time as Trump’s 2016 campaign activated something that had always been there. Then Hawaii. Then a pandemic. Then federal agents in unmarked vehicles abducting protesters from the streets of Portland.

Not My America is part memoir, part COVID journal, part political essay collection — a record of one man’s attempt to reconcile the America he believed in as a boy with the one that actually exists. Candid about drug use, alcoholism, family violence, and his own failures. Unflinching about racism, class, and the machinery of American decline.

For readers who grew up believing in something that didn’t quite pan out.