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Before I Knew My Name
Book One of The Long Way Here
by Joshua McCray
Forty-five years old. Single. A government job, a therapist he actually listens to, and a miniature Goldendoodle named Clark who has claimed two-thirds of the bed and shows absolutely no remorse. From the outside, Joaquin Aberra has built a life that looks stable, even successful. What he hasn't figured out yet is how to fully live in it.
He is also still the five-year-old boy who stood on a sidewalk in New Mexico and watched his mother drive away.
In Before I Knew My Name, the first novel in The Long Way Here series, Joshua McCray traces the emotional distance between where we come from and who we become. Moving between two timelines-young Joaquin, shaped by absence, expectation, and survival, and adult Joaquin, navigating therapy, loneliness, and the quiet, persistent hope for love-the novel unfolds as a deeply personal exploration of identity, memory, and belonging.
From the Navajo Reservation to Chicago to Washington, DC, Joaquin carries with him the weight of family: a father who was never there, a mother who left, and a grandmother who rebuilt her life from nothing and demanded he do the same. In the present, he is learning-sometimes reluctantly-how to stay: in relationships, in cities, in his own life.
Both intimate and expansive, Before I Knew My Name is a literary novel about the long, uneven journey toward self-understanding. It is about the stories we inherit, the ones we try to outrun, and the ones we eventually learn to claim.
Hilarious, heartbreaking, and quietly powerful, this debut announces Joshua McCray as a distinctive new voice in contemporary literary fiction.
