Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom

Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom is built from two distinct registers of truth. The first is the adult memoir: Kitzmiller looking back at his childhood and early adolescence with the unblinking clarity that only distance provides. The second is far rarer. Woven directly throughout the narrative are raw poems he wrote during those exact childhood years—before retrospect existed, and before he had the language to frame what was happening as anything other than what it was. The prose memoir and the archival poetry do not tell the same story; together, they tell the full one.

As the essential prequel to A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster, this volume reaches further back to document the official origin story of the "Toaster." It stands as the foundational explanation for everything that followed in the artist's life and catalog.

• Editorial Status: The essential prequel to A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster and the foundational explanation for the entire multi-medium portfolio.

• For Readers Of: Educated by Tara Westover, Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, childhood trauma survivor accounts, and unblinking mental health memoirs.

• Reading Order: This volume is engineered to change the book it precedes. Readers can dive into A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster first, or begin here. Either way, the connection between the two volumes reveals why the other had to exist.

Some stories take decades to write. This one took forty years of living it first.

Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom rewinds the clock and returns to Fort Wayne, Indiana—to a childhood that didn't offer much in the way of mercy, and an adolescence that offered even less. For decades, David Kitzmiller carried the weight of childhood physical and sexual abuse, addiction, bipolar disorder, severe depression, and PTSD—the collective weight of a life that began harder than most and kept finding new ways to get harder. This is the memoir he always needed to write, and spent the longest time figuring out how to execute with absolute honesty.

This is not a comfortable read; it was not engineered to be comfortable. Kitzmiller understands the strict difference between comforting the reader and maintaining accurate documentation. The abuse shaped the addiction. The addiction deepened the depression. The bipolar disorder and the PTSD arrived and stayed, and this memoir refuses to pretend otherwise. It does not separate the threads neatly. Instead, against every odd, it finds the voice to speak about all of it directly—completely devoid of self-pity, executed with precision, and balanced with the kind of dry, dark survival humor that only an individual who has navigated the descent could pull off.

• The Dual Psychological Voice: The book is built from two distinct registers of truth. The first is the retrospective adult memoir, looking back at childhood with the unblinking clarity that only distance provides. The second is far rarer: woven directly throughout the narrative are the exact, archival poems Kitzmiller wrote during those childhood years—before retrospect existed, and before he had the language to frame what was happening. The prose and the childhood verse do not repeat the same story; together, they tell the full one.

• The Architecture of Hidden Damage: The text examines severe environments that do not announce themselves as damage until decades later: physical exploitation, poverty, and the heavy silence that rigid religious expectation imposed on pain that deserved to be spoken. The early lure of substances surfaces here not as classic adolescent rebellion, but as the only available emergency exit from a reality that had become too much to inhabit.

• Primary Source Documents: The embedded childhood poems are not decorative filler; they are primary source assets. Written during the high-friction events being described rather than in reflection of them, they exist in an immediate, unguarded register that prose cannot replicate. They say in six lines what the surrounding chapters take a full page to approach.

"Kitzmiller's debut delivers a powerful origin story without theatrics. This is memoir stripped to its bones, painful, precise, and quietly triumphant." — Barnes & Noble Editorial Review

"Unflinching and unfiltered. This book is a gut-wrenching look at trauma and survival. The interspersed poems are small miracles of truth." — Ink & Ash Reviews, Maya Patel

"A harrowing memoir that refuses to look away. David Kitzmiller bares his scars and invites you into the darkest parts of his youth, and somehow leaves you with hope." — The Literary Survivalist Journal, Rafael Torres

• Author: David Kitzmiller

• Imprint: Norman Kitzmiller Publications

• Genre: Literary Nonfiction / Prequel Memoir / Trauma Recovery / Mental Health

• Themes: Institutional Silence, Childhood Survival, Substance Dependency, Coping Mechanics

• Formats Available: Premium Trade Paperback / Digital eBook / Collector's Hardcover

For Journalists: View Full Press Release