30 Rooms to Hide In

Six brothers grow up in the ’50s and ’60s amid an alcoholic father whose sanity slowly erodes. For a journalist, Luke Sullivan had quite an unusual childhood, but it taught him many lessons that would help him later as he reported on local news events and traveled the world to write true-life adventure stories. 

In his memoir Thirty Rooms to Hide In, he tells the story of his alcoholic father’s slow descent into insanity, from one of the world’s top orthopedic surgeons at the Mayo Clinic to someone who is increasingly abusive and finally dies alone on the floor of a Georgia motel room. 

Sullivan doesn’t sugarcoat the details; in fact, he admits that some of them are “dark enough to make your skin crawl. ” But at the same time, he says that there were also many good times during those years—and the book contains lots of darkly funny memories.