After four decades of addiction, homelessness and a stranger’s seven-word warning, Palmer rebuilt his life. His new book is a raw, often funny, deeply human account of how a man written off by nearly everyone finished stronger than he started.
PITTSBURG, Calif. — Sixteen years ago, Ronnie M. Palmer woke up tied to a hospital gurney in San Francisco with no memory of how he got there. A stranger walked up, leaned in close, and said seven words that would change the rest of his life: “If you don’t get some help soon, you are going to die.” Then the man untied him and walked away. Palmer never saw him again.
That moment is the beating heart of Finishing Stronger, Palmer’s new memoir from Parker Publishers. Across 156 unflinching pages, Palmer traces a life that began in a Fort Worth incubator in 1949, the unwanted child of a 14-year-old girl, and somehow ended in a small house in Pittsburg, California, with a wife, a daughter, a counseling career, and the kind of peace most people in his old life never lived to see.
A memoir that refuses to flinch
Finishing Stronger is structured the way memory actually works, not in tidy chapters but in the names of the cities that held him, and sometimes nearly killed him. Dallas. Houston. Miami. San Antonio. San Francisco, twice. Each chapter marks a chance, and almost every chance is squandered before the next one arrives. Palmer writes about bare-knuckle fighting uncles, a father who once delivered cash to Al Capone, a childhood whiskey shot offered as flu medicine, and the slow, almost casual way addiction stitched itself into a kid who never quite got the start everyone else seemed to.
The voice is what carries it. Palmer writes the way people actually talk after they have stopped lying to themselves: plain, sometimes profane, often very funny, never self-pitying. He digresses constantly and tells the reader so. He admits to memory gaps and fills them with what he can. He laughs at himself in places where most memoirists would reach for violins.
Underneath the humor is something rarer: a writer who has done the work of forgiving the people who hurt him without pretending they did not. The book moves through the wreckage and the small graces in roughly equal measure. There is the judge who looked at his file, paused for a long time, and said, “Mr. Palmer, go home. I need you more over there than I need you in my jail.” There is the counselor who told him his forty years of drinking might actually qualify him to help someone else. And there is Layla, the stepdaughter from China who, years later, would sit beside him in a Berkeley City College classroom and ask him to please, finally, write the whole thing down.
The man behind the book
Ronnie M. Palmer was not supposed to make it. Left on a hospital lobby couch by his teenage mother, he spent his first month in an incubator and the next several decades, as he puts it, “behind the eight ball.” He flunked out of Texas Tech in 1968. His father told him he had a strong back and a weak mind. For a long time the old man was right. Palmer’s addiction spanned roughly forty years and most of the United States, cycling through detoxes, relapses, jails, and stretches of homelessness so cold he still remembers what San Francisco rain feels like when you have nowhere to put your body.
The turn came in 2006, after the stranger in the hospital. Palmer enrolled at City College of San Francisco and completed the drug and alcohol counseling program. He has now logged 41 college classes, 37 A’s and 4 B’s, a statistic he mentions with the quiet pride of a man who once believed he was stupid. He went on to become Men’s Program Coordinator at Options Recovery Services in Berkeley, where he taught Tai Chi to seventy clients three days a week. For the last five years, he has served as Program Coordinator at Alhambra Valley Retreat, where he now spends his days doing for other people what that stranger once did for him. In 2012 he traveled to China, married Lan Ying Jiang, and gained a stepdaughter who renamed herself Layla after the Eric Clapton song he played every morning. He calls them the Pfamily. He is sober. And he wrote a book about it, partly because his daughter asked, and partly because somewhere out there is another person tied to another gurney, waiting for someone to tell them the truth.
“God led me through hell so that I could help lead other people out of hell.” — from the Epilogue
About the book
Title: Finishing Stronger | Author: Ronnie M. Palmer | Publisher: Parker Publishers
Genre: Memoir / Addiction & Recovery / Inspirational Nonfiction
About the author
Ronnie M. Palmer is a state-certified drug and alcohol counselor based in Pittsburg, California, and has served as Program Coordinator at Alhambra Valley Retreat for the last five years. Born in Fort Worth in 1949, he spent more than four decades struggling with addiction and homelessness before earning his certifications at City College of San Francisco and going on to serve as Men’s Program Coordinator at Options Recovery Services in Berkeley. He has worked as a counselor for more than ten years. Finishing Stronger is his first book.
For Any Media Inquiries, Please Contact Maxine
