Jonathan Lindstrom holds a B.A. in English and grew up in the Boston area. He completed graduate studies in San Diego and has spent much of his professional life working in the mental health field with adolescents and families.
He is a writer whose work spans memoir, literary fiction, and high-concept mystery. His writing often focuses on memory, moral ambiguity, and the hidden forces that shape identity over time, with particular attention to class, place, and unspoken social rules.
Unrequited
Unrequited: A Gay Memoir is a story of growing up earnest, observant, but consistently out of sync. It moves through childhood and adolescence in scenes that are often funny—sometimes painfully so—while tracing a series of attachments that are real, sustaining, and never fully returned.
These early loves are not tragic in the grand sense. They are intense and frequently absurd: friendships overloaded with meaning, crushes conducted entirely in silence, elaborate emotional theories built on little evidence. They generate joy, purpose, and momentum—alongside waves of confusion and heartache, and very little chance of robust fulfillment.
If stories like Heartstopper are about connection arriving just in time, Unrequited is about what happens when it doesn’t. When timing fails, signals misfire, and longing becomes both a source of meaning and a recurring pratfall. A reader once called it Heartfloppers. That feels about right.
Written with clarity and restraint, Unrequited treats adolescent feeling neither as trauma nor as joke, but as a serious, sometimes comic apprenticeship—one in which wanting matters, even when little comes of it.
First Person
Unconcealed
Contact: jonathanlindstrom74@gmail.com