Another hilarious hyperbolic memoir from Edward R. Murrow award-winning author David Gilmore capturing the lunacy of growing up in rural inland Florida in the 1980s.

The Little Man in My Brain takes you back to a time and place when hair was big and minds were small as seen from the perspective of a mischievous and wildly unpopular kid voted most likely to blow away in a strong wind.

David Gilmore was born in Southern California but when his family fell on hard times, he was whisked away from Laguna Beach to East Fort Myers, Florida—a godforsaken part of the country inhabited by old school Florida “crackers” and conservative snowbirds from the Midwest. There in the sun-baked hellscape, the author was raised as a liberal Californian ex-pat in the deeply racist and alligator-infested swamps where folks had never quite accepted that the Civil War was in fact over.

To cope with the cultural adversity, Gilmore invented a little man—a homunculus of sorts—to be his friend and accomplice. The imaginary man lived deep inside the author’s brain as an all-knowing and wise little creature on call 24/7 for guidance and advice.

This memoir is both charming and uproarious, chock-full of eccentric, quirky, and dimwitted characters. And it’s a story of survival for a nerdy, misfit gay kid growing up in a place where he might very well have been tossed to the alligators for being different.

The Little Man in My Brain is as enchanting as it is funny.

“Fort Myers was and is a place like no other. David Gilmore captures the good (there wasn’t a lot), the bad, and the ugly (there were equal quantities of both) of coming of age in 70s and 80s in Southwest Florida. It was an area not noted for great intellect or culture or progressive politics, yet Gilmore survived and thrived to tell his story through the lens of a keenly observational eye.”

— Scott Simmons, formerly with
The Palm Beach Post and Florida Weekly,