What I Did

When spirited six-year-old Billy Wright, out for an early-morning walk in the park with his father, runs into a busy street, his world is irreversibly altered, though he doesn’t know it at the time. A passerby has seen Billy’s father pull him from the road and spank him. Within an hour, she has informed social services, plunging the family into a waking nightmare that begins with a social worker’s visit and escalates—thanks to bad luck, bad judgment and a series of misunderstandings—until the family is threatened to its core. Billy is one of the most captivating narrators in recent fiction: his idiosyncratic, frequently hilarious voice is an insightful guide through this tragicomic story about the unseen consequences of a split-second decision, about a childhood interrupted and about the lengths to which we will go to protect the ones we love.