Montana Made: How Losing My Father, My Mind, and My Patience Made Me (Sort of) a Better Man

What happens when the life you built stops making sense? One man finds out the hard, funny, and painfully honest way.

When Garth Gerhart receives word that his estranged father has died, he boards a plane to Montana carrying more than a suitcase—he carries decades of silence, regret, and questions without answers. What begins as an obligation to bury the past turns into an unflinching confrontation with it.

Montana Made is a brutally funny and achingly honest memoir about what it means to come undone in the middle of life. With the sharp wit of a Mad Magazine humorist and the raw candor of a man in free fall, Gerhart wrestles with grief, depression, family, and the fragile rules we cling to just to keep going.

Along winding highways and in awkward family reunions, through therapy sessions and late-night breakdowns, Gerhart discovers that healing rarely looks heroic. Sometimes it looks like failure. Sometimes it looks like laughter. Sometimes it looks like finally daring to turn around and face where you came from.

For anyone who has ever wondered how to keep living when the life you built no longer makes sense, Montana Made is a testament to the mess, the madness, and the small mercies that can still bring us home.