A figure standing on a rock, facing a foggy sea.

A work of autofiction  ยท  coming soon

Straight

A Life in Circles

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

A novel, drawn from a life, by Obadiah Jude Arthur
Request an early copy Read more

Author's Note

Some moments have stayed with me my entire life.

Others have faded, blurred together, or disappeared.

No version would be exact.

This is the story I'm choosing to tell.

— Obadiah Jude Arthur

About the book

At fourteen, his parents drove him somewhere and didn't say where.
He spent the next thirty years finding his way back.

June 9, 1989. A car pulls up at a T stop in Brookline. His father gets out, says almost nothing, and tells him to get in. By the end of that ride, someone else has decided who Obadiah Arthur is going to be — and it takes him half a lifetime to find out whether they were right.

What follows isn't a straight line. It circles back on itself for thirty years — relapse, reinvention, and a label he spends most of his adult life either living up to or trying to outrun.

Straight: A Life in Circles is a work of autofiction — a novel built from a real life, with the freedom to shape what memory alone couldn't hold — about the identity other people hand you before you're old enough to refuse it, and the much longer work of deciding which parts of it were ever true.

From the contents

  • 01 The Circle Closes
  • 12 Nevermore
  • 27 First Night
  • 42 Obie the Arts
  • 54 Reckoning
  • 67 The Book of Obadiah
  • 77 Epilogue

77 chapters. One epilogue that took thirty years to write.

From the book

“
“Hi Obie, love ya Obie.” The sound was attacking, sharp and sudden. It wasn't mocking. It wasn't kind either. It was loud, unified, rehearsed, like a military salute.
From Chapter Fifteen, “Love Ya, Obie”
“
I needed something. Needed her voice. Needed her wings.
From Chapter Twenty-Seven, “First Night”
“
I waited for the shift. For the grin to turn mean. For the room to tilt.
From Chapter Forty-Two, “Obie the Arts”
“
Violence had become the language of the room.
From Chapter Sixty-Five, “In the Mouth of Madness”

Also in the works

The audiobook is coming.

Straight: A Life in Circles is being recorded for audio. Check back here for the release, or email the author to be notified when it's ready.

OBADIAH
JUDE
ARTHUR

About the author

Obadiah “Obie” Jude Arthur

Obie lives in Boston with his wife and two children.

Straight: A Life in Circles is his first book — started, stalled, and rewritten across most of his adult life, and finally finished at night, after the rest of the house had gone to sleep.

Advance readers

Read it before anyone else does.

The book is finished. Before it goes to publishers, I'm looking for a small number of early readers willing to read it and, if it moves you, say so somewhere honest.

Email the author