This is a vivid and lyrical memoir, telling the story of Bob Smith's youth, and how it was changed - and rescued - by Shakespeare. It is both a redemptive memoir of a man made whole by art, and an intimate encounter with the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. Bob Smith knows every single Shakespeare play inside and out. He's memorized half of them line for line and every week he teaches the plays to 600 senior citizens. What he brings to these elderly people is the gift of the restorative power of Shakespeare. Specifically, Shakespeare's soul-touching language and eternal understanding of the human condition. Smith was born a fragile boy from a painful household presided over by an unstable, depressive mother who depended on him, an unsupportive, unavailable father and a severely disabled, beautiful sister who lived at home, largely cared for by Bob. At the age of ten, Smith stumbled upon a line from "The Merchant of Venice" - "in sooth I know not why I am so sad" - and recognized himself in this poetic, melancholy language, finding a buoy that would keep him afloat for the rest of his tumultuous life. It provided him with a place to hide, a place to find and know and be himself.