Memories In A Notebook
About this series
The Awkward Formula for Growing Up is an honest portrait of early adolescence. It captures the moment when childhood ends in a slow, inevitable bend toward adulthood. The novel stands alone while also opening a multi‑volume cycle that traces Chris’s life. Sometimes funny, exciting, emotional, or tragic.
Stories
The Awkward Formula for Growing Up: Catholic School and Other Tiny Disasters
Story 1 • 17 chapters
The Awkward Formula follows Chris through the messy, tender years between childhood and adulthood. He stumbles through first crushes, shifting friendships, family tensions, and the quiet moments that end up mattering more than he ever expected.
Set in early‑1990s Florida, the series captures adolescence in all its contradictions. This is growing up the way it really happens: slowly, awkwardly, and in pieces.
Catholic School
And so it begins
Introductions and Expectations
Football and Friends
You ok?
Play Strong
Growing Pains
Labor Day
Campsite
Fighting with Wyatt
Confessions in the parking lot
Stupid is as stupid does
Fish fry and hurt feelings
Homecoming
Halloween
Flowers, Fights and Football
The Jacket
Songs in the Key of Life
Story 5 • 0 chapters
Memories in a Notebook: The Awkward Formula for Growing Up is a coming-of-age memoir/novel-in-stories that follows Christopher James Dowling through the fragile, chaotic, and deeply formative years of junior high in late-1980s Florida. Recently uprooted by his parents’ divorce and thrust into Catholic school after his mother’s conversion, Christopher enters seventh grade carrying a mix of shame, confusion, longing, and defiance. He is caught between worlds: between childhood and adolescence, between his mother’s religious rigidity and his father’s complicated absence, between who he has been and who he is becoming.
Christopher’s days are scored by Depeche Mode, The Cure, U2, and Faith No More; every chapter takes its title and emotional resonance from a song that anchors a memory.