May 23, 2025 – Indianapolis, IN – With the publication of his new memoir Fitting In, author Jeremy Tyler presents a scorching personal account that confronts some of the most urgent, agonizing, and insistent problems confronting many in America today: bullying, religious persecution, child sexual abuse, and the lifelong search for self-worth. Through honest storytelling and poetic writing, Tyler provides readers with a glimpse of what it's like to come of age gay in a world where love is conditional and silence is survival.

In Fitting In, Jeremy welcomes us into his childhood, a space defined by constant harassment at school and emotional numbness at home. From an early age, he was attacked for being different. "I was called a skinny fag hundreds of times a day," Jeremy writes. "I did not know what I had done wrong, only that I had become the target of choice." Beaten, choked, and humiliated in school bathrooms and hallways, Jeremy’s suffering was only amplified by the awareness that he could not talk openly at home.

Brought up in an austere Jehovah's Witness home, Jeremy learned that homosexuality was not only wrong it was incompatible with being saved. "I knew I was different," he confesses, "but I also knew that if I ever said it out loud, I would be losing the only family I had left." This intense internal struggle, the desire for acceptance opposite the fear of rejection, torments much of the memoir, particularly its first half.

His emotional refuge came in the form of books, piano keys, and the loyal companionship of a dog named Ginger. A gifted musician and avid reader, Tyler created his own world within the four walls of his bedroom. “Books became my armor,” he writes. “In a world that mocked me for my body and judged me for my silence, stories offered escape and strength.”

But the trauma didn't stop there. Jeremy discloses that he was sexually abused by a piano teacher as a child, an ordeal he kept buried for decades under bars of guilt and terror. His failure to say anything was not just due to shame but due to a sense of not being safe. The same silence that preserved his anonymity also became the cage holding his anguish within.

"Fitting In isn't about surviving trauma," adds Jeremy. "It's about surviving silence."

His book is both political and personal, braiding his own story into a broader complaint about how society abuses its most vulnerable, particularly children who do not fit the norms of gender or faith. Jeremy explores how institutions, religious and educational, all too frequently avert their eyes from cruelty in the service of conformity.

Now in his 40s and openly living as a gay man, Jeremy has achieved tranquility through writing, exercise, fitness, and studying cultures. He has degrees in Culinary Arts and Spanish, and is studying world languages and literature education at an advanced level. Yet the war for self-acceptance continues.

"Getting out of prison was not the end of my sentence," we are told. "The most difficult part has always been learning to love myself in a world that told me I shouldn't."

Fitting In is not just a memoir. It is a reflection for anyone who ever felt they were outside the main action. Jeremy Tyler’s is a testament to the durability of the human spirit and the therapeutic power of truth.

In bookstores and available online now.

About the Author

Jeremy Tyler is a food artist, fitness trainer, and cultural activist. He teaches and communicates his love of food, language, and healing to students and readers. Fitting In is his first memoir and a heartfelt account of his path to freedom both internal and external.

Author: Jeremy Tyler

Available Book: Fitting In By Jeremy Tyler

Website: https://jeremytyler.net/