Chernivtsi, Ukraine → Salt Lake City
I write memoir the way I lived it: plainly, and without asking permission to tell the truth.
Two books about leaving an orphanage, crossing a border, and building a marriage that took the country five more years to recognise.
The short version
For interviewers, event programmes and anyone who has to introduce me. Take it as it is — it is accurate.
Vitaly Kirkpatrick grew up in an orphanage in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and arrived at JFK on the fifth of August, 2005, with two suitcases and three dollars. He met his husband Kimball the following spring and married him in 2008 — five years before the federal government would recognise it, and eight before he could legally take his name. He is the author of The Misadventures of a Ukrainian Orphan (2022) and Green Card, Gold Ring. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he also works in analytical science.
I had been married since 2008 and had never been able to take Kimball's name.
Green Card, Gold Ring
The longer one
I did not set out to be a writer of immigration stories. I set out to get through the immigration, and the writing was what I did at night so the days would hold still long enough to be looked at.
The first book is the orphanage: Chernivtsi in the nineties, a childhood spent learning which adults meant what they said. Writing was already my refuge by then — I put emotions I could not yet name into poems, in an institution where naming them out loud was not safe. That book ends where most immigrant stories begin, at an airport.
The second book is everything the paperwork did to a marriage. We began on the fifteenth of May, 2006, with two careful messages and a dollar movie ticket. We married on the fifteenth of August, 2008, in San Diego. And then the Defense of Marriage Act sat between us and every ordinary thing a married couple takes for granted — a visa, a surname, the right to be on the same form — until 2013.
That is the part I had not seen written down anywhere. There are books about coming out and books about immigrating. I could not find the one about doing both at once, where the two processes make each other harder, and where the government's answer to who are you to each other was, for five years, legally, nobody.
I do not write trauma for its own sake. If a scene is in the book, it is because it is true and it moved something — not because it is shocking. Everything else is a decision about structure, and structure is where most memoirs about hard childhoods go wrong.
A dated spine
Every date below appears in the books, and every one of them is checkable.
Western Ukraine, after the Soviet Union ended and before anything replaced it. I wrote poems there.
Two suitcases and a bandura. Not enough for the luggage cart, which cost exactly what I had.
And a dollar movie ticket. Twenty years later he is still here.
As Vitaly Magidov and Kimball Kirkpatrick. Legal in California. Invisible to the federal government.
Under the Defense of Marriage Act, no federal purpose whatsoever recognised the marriage. Not the visa. Not the name.
The Misadventures of a Ukrainian Orphan, published February 2022. Now in its second printing.
Fifty chapters. The one I could not find on a shelf, so I wrote it.
The books
Not a rebrand. The first book carries the name I was born with, because when I wrote it that was still the only name the law would let me have.
Growing up in an orphanage in Chernivtsi, and starting over in a country that did not owe me anything.
We got married in 2008. It took the country five more years to agree. Immigration paperwork on one table, a wedding ring on the other.
The other half of the week
Outside the page I work in analytical science — near‑infrared spectroscopy and food-quality analysis, ten years of it, most recently across the western United States. It is the discipline of proving what a thing is actually made of rather than what it appears to be.
I am aware of how that reads next to a memoir. It is the same habit. A sample does not care what you hoped it contained, and neither does a manuscript — which is why I fact-check my own book against contemporaneous documents rather than against my memory of them.
Drafts are memory. Records are evidence.
For press
I am glad to talk about immigration and marriage law, orphanage childhoods, writing a second book against a first, or how a manuscript gets fact-checked. Contact through this page — I read everything that comes in myself.