The BONES

I didn’t BURY

A Punk Gospel in Seven Parts

WHEN THE WORLD FORGETS YOU

SURVIVAL becomes PROPHECY JOY becomes REBELLION SILENCE becomes TESTIMONY

ABOUT THE BOOK

Structured around the prophet Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones,The Bones I Didn’t Bury is a memoir of resurrection and unflinching grace. Raw and cinematic, it carries readers through seven movements—from the valley to the rising—blending childhood, heartbreak, neurosurgery, disability advocacy, and the haunting choreography of faith.

  • Childhood shaped by saints, a near-death birth, and seeing truth in art and justice. Survival and sacred beauty are seeded early.

  • Adolescence and early adulthood marked by identity-seeking, first loves, aesthetic awakenings, and the tension between perception and reality. Prophecy begins to flicker.

  • Early adulthood: leaving home, creative ambition, and the first fractures of the body and spirit. Beauty clashes with despair, and vocation with fragile, tender faith.

  • A typo on a brain scan leads to neurosurgery, rattling body and soul. Life and death collide, demanding a reckoning with mortality.

  • Motherhood deepens the call to advocacy. When her nonverbal autistic son is failed by the very systems designed to support him, private testimony becomes public prophecy.

  • The fight escalates as exclusion hardens into direct confrontation with institutions. Private grief transforms into collective fire, and friends turn up everywhere.

  • Resolution through resurrection becomes the blueprint for punk gospel.

  • Artifacts, receipts, and documentary fragments underscore the book’s prophetic and evidentiary spine.

Structure

Bones is a seven-part ossuary, aligned with the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. Each part carries the reader deeper into fracture until testimony becomes a cultural reckoning.

The Bones I Didn’t Bury is a memoir of rupture and resurrection—told with a voice sharpened by awe, absurdity, and truth.

Born in a tornado and raised on Catholic ritual and MTV’s flicker, Kristin Dillon learns to see fracture and beauty side by side, to laugh even as she questions. Heartache hones her voice—sparring with nuns, losing herself in the thrum of rock shows, catching truth in paint and passport stamps.

Then rupture strikes: the brain scan, the career, the very ground beneath her. Yet humor and clarity thread through every break, giving survival its glow.

Motherhood makes the prophecy plain. One afternoon her nonverbal autistic son appears at the front door in the middle of the school day. Blue eyes steady, cheeks flushed, wearing her snow boots. Silence itself a summons, calling her from private survival into public defiance.

Beauty and justice will not stay buried. Even dry bones can speak.

Synopsis

“My next vacation is a field trip to death. And we watch the sky melt to black.”

“For the mothers who carry truth in their marrow. For the children whose mouths won’t move the way the world demands~but whose spirits, speech devices, gestures, eyes THUNDER. For the nonverbal prophets. For the sacred screamers and dreamers.”

B-SIDE
Funny how a paper bag taught me everything I’d need to know about being exposed.”

LIES WE BOTH BELIEVED
how much cosmic clearance do you need by then the cat was fully out of the bag leaping to countertops running figure 8s with her tail purring one minute hissing and swatting the next inner circles triaging and shipping us this wasn’t a secret anymore it was a volatile truth orbiting too close to burn

THE SECOND OPINION

He blinks.
“Oh. I don’t read the written part. I just compare images.”

I blink back.
I’m the written part, motherf*cker.

THE COSMIC SET-UP

“Mine was the wild imagination of my parents—groovy twenty-somethings who embodied the 1970s: lamb chop sideburns, steam-shaped Farrah curls, plaid shirts with pearl snaps, huge belts, pinkie rings. There were skylights, lofts, huge facades of glass, bold colors—yellow, orange, tomato red—paired with black and white details.”

 Contact Kristin.