He does not wax on about the Baudelairean flaneur or the Elkinian flaneuse. In the canon of contemporary writers who write about walking (Rebecca Solnit, Will Self, Frédéric Gros, Teju Cole, Garnette Cadogan), Fitzgerald is unusually down-to-earth. He began documenting these walks, first on Twitter, then on a weekly Substack newsletter titled Walk It Off. He walked (and skateboarded) seven miles from Brooklyn to Manhattan. He gradually ventured farther and farther from home. His world widened, and the pall of the pandemic seemed to lift. His body changed shape in ways that pleased him. (Fitzgerald, who has no kids and has lowered his cost of living in order to be what he calls a “time millionaire,” could afford this luxury.) It worked wonders. Last summer, prompted by a health alert from his iPhone about how sedentary he was becoming, Fitzgerald set himself the goal of walking 20,000 steps, or roughly ten miles, a day. But he had also experienced a painful breakup with his fiancée, the writer Alice Sola Kim, and survived a plague. In the past 18 months, that reputation had only grown: Fitzgerald had published a best-selling children’s book, finished an essay collection, and maintained a semi-regular book-recommendation segment on the Today show. As an essayist and editor, Fitzgerald had long served as a kind of genial barkeep of the literary internet - an avuncular, boozy presence with killer taste in books.
It was an apt metaphor for the year he, and many of us, had just lived through: unpredictable, surreal, plunging, soaring.
Then it began a yet-more-tortuous series of swoops and twists. After a sickening interval - that moment when vastly divergent futures have yet to fork - the stunt plane finally righted itself.
(“Excuse my language,” he added primly.) It was a small blue propeller plane, but in that moment it most resembled a leaf tumbling end over end. The writer Isaac Fitzgerald was walking across a parking lot one day this summer when he looked up to find an airplane falling out of the sky.
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