Vitaly Kirkpatrick

The books

Everything I have written.

Four memoirs, one life, told in order. One is in print and being reissued as The Boy Behind Iron Gates, one is drafted, one is finished, and one is being written.

Third-edition cover: The Boy Behind Iron GatesThird edition

Book One

VITALY

The Misadventures of a Ukrainian Orphan

Abandoned at six. Raised behind iron gates.

An orphanage in Chernivtsi, in a Ukraine that had just stopped being the Soviet Union. Winters cold enough to wear a hat and scarf indoors, a yard you did not leave without permission, and a boy working out how much of himself he was allowed to want.

First published in 2022 under the name Vitaly Magidov. The third edition is in preparation as THE BOY BEHIND IRON GATES — A Memoir of a Ukrainian Orphanage, Foster Care, and Finding Home — reissued under my own name, revised and expanded with the Ukraine of my childhood restored to the page, so the four books stand together as one story.

2022First published
In preparationNew edition
386Pages

It starts behind a gate. See what is on the other side.

Read about Book One
Cover of The Family I Went Looking For by Vitaly KirkpatrickDrafted

Book Two · Elder Magidov series

The Family I Went Looking For

A Gay LDS Missionary Memoir — from a Ukrainian Orphanage to the England London Mission

A boy with no family joined the church to find one, and for two years, it worked.

From a Ukrainian orphanage to the England London Mission, 2002–2004. Not a story about leaving the church — a story about entering it, and what it gave him before the part of himself it had no room for caught up with him.

Drafted, not finished.

2002–2004Mission years
DraftedStatus

It ends on the morning somebody gave me a gold ring.

Read about Book Two
Cover of Green Card, Gold Ring by Vitaly Kirkpatrick, two wedding rings on a road at duskComing soon

Book Three

Green Card, Gold Ring

A Gay Memoir of Marriage, Immigration, and Eleven Years of Proving It Was Real

Two governments had to sign off before I could call this a marriage.

Landing at JFK in 2005 with three dollars, a bandura and a folder of documents nobody back home believed in. Eleven years later a stranger across a desk decided whether the man I had married counted as my husband.

A dollar cinema ticket in Provo, a marriage California allowed and Washington did not, and DOMA falling in 2013. Immigration and love as the one story they always were.

51Chapters
122,703Words
FinishedStatus

The manuscript is done. You can read chapter one today.

Read the first chapter
Cover of How Big Am I Allowed to Dream by Vitaly KirkpatrickBeing written

Book Four

How Big Am I Allowed to Dream

From a Ukrainian orphanage to a company of my own

The question underneath all of it.

What a person raised to expect nothing does with permission, once it finally arrives. Building something from an accent, a borrowed laptop, and no inherited sense of what was reasonable to attempt.

Still being written, in the open.

In progressStatus
Work, risk, belongingSubject

Not finished. Watch it get written.

See where it is going