Trey Toler has lived enough lives to fill a book – which is exactly what he did. He spent his teens as an unlikely caregiver, navigating medical crises and adult responsibility before most kids had a driver's license. In his twenties, he found his footing on stage as a stand-up comedian, performing regularly at Atlanta's Laughing Skull Lounge and eventually running the shows there, along the way earning the mentorship of Margaret Cho and an internship at Turner Broadcasting's Adult Swim. He traded the mic for a career in media and advertising, where he discovered the same instincts that made him good onstage—reading a room, finding the truth that connects—made him good in recruiting and sales too.

"Good Damage is the debut memoir from Trey Toler about the messy, unscripted "after. “ After the illness, the loss, the burnout, and the exhausting performance of recovery.

The story begins with a Southern childhood governed by rules no one explains: sunscreen and flip flops are gay, and umbrellas are for women. Trey comes of age as the boy who could never quite get those rules right, raised in a church where the preacher says homosexual the way you say abomination (slow, careful, like the word itself could spread).

At the heart of the story is his mother—her fierce beauty, her harrowing brain surgery, and her eventual absence. Trey explores the deafening silence that follows when the person who made the world feel safe is gone, and the strange, delayed grief that refuses to arrive—or leave—on schedule."

https://ripples.media/books/good-damage/

Find him on Instagram and TikTok at @Toler_the_Trey and on Substack at @TreyToler1.