Rich Trout’s Up All Night: An Aspie’s Memoir of Chasing Girls in Quicksand isn’t loud. It doesn’t come with a celebrity blurb or a viral TikTok campaign. And that’s exactly why it matters.
Because what this book delivers—page after unfiltered page—is the raw, hilarious, and often heartbreaking truth of what it feels like to live in a world built for someone else’s brain. A world that never gave Rich Trout a blueprint—but still expected him to color within the lines.
This is not a political book. It’s not even a traditional autism memoir. It’s a deeply personal, sharply observed journey through awkward adolescence, spiritual rebirth, and the lifelong search for something universal: a place to belong.
A Different Kind of American Story
He didn’t know then that he was living with Asperger’s Syndrome—because no one else did either.
What he did know was that he loved his brother Rob with fierce loyalty. That he was obsessed with books, baseball, and women he didn’t understand. That he could make people laugh, even when he didn’t mean to. And that he couldn’t make sense of a world that seemed to come with invisible instructions no one gave him.
In other words, he was human—just wired differently.
A Book That Stands With the Outsiders
Up All Night is not polished for easy consumption. It’s raw and jagged in the best way, filled with unflinching stories of bullying, teenage sexual confusion, and family survival. Trout writes with a voice that’s one part newsroom sharp, one part stand-up comic, and one part deeply wounded kid still figuring out where he went wrong.
Yet amid all the chaos, there’s a rhythm: a resilience. He keeps going. Keeps observing. Keeps feeling.
This is what makes his story feel so familiar, even if your own brain wiring is different. Because at some level, we’ve all struggled to translate ourselves into a language others understand.
And Trout’s story reminds us: the ability to laugh through that struggle doesn’t mean the pain wasn’t real.
Humor Without Apology. Pain Without Pity.
There’s a refreshing absence of performance in Trout’s narrative. He doesn’t pretend to be a saint or a genius. He’s not asking for applause or absolution. He’s asking to be heard—finally, fully, and on his own terms.
From awkward fraternity parties to a disturbing encounter with a suicidal friend, from adolescent crushes that went nowhere to spiritual awakenings that went everywhere, Trout tells the truth with a wit sharpened by years of self-survival.
But what grounds the narrative isn’t just style—it’s sincerity.
He speaks lovingly of his family, especially Rob, the brother who often acted as translator to the world. He acknowledges the pain of being the “weird kid” and the guilt of surviving when others didn’t. And he admits—with no performative modesty—that he didn’t truly begin healing until he found God.
Faith That Feels Earned, Not Instructed
One of the most powerful sections of the book arrives well past the halfway mark. It’s not some dramatic twist—it’s a quiet moment in an airport, when everything changes.
In 2013, in a Phoenix terminal, Trout experienced what he describes as “a sudden knowing.” A whisper of grace that finally broke through decades of noise.
He writes about that day with reverence—but also with restraint. There are no grand declarations. No overexplained theology. Just a man who encountered something real, and responded with surrender.
What followed was baptism. Clarity. Peace. And a sense of purpose that had eluded him through every failed social interaction, every toxic relationship, every night spent “chasing girls in quicksand.”
His faith does not come wrapped in judgment or certainty. It comes in humility, which makes it oddly magnetic. You don’t feel preached at. You feel invited.
Why This Book Feels Like a Mirror
It’s easy to write off memoirs as indulgent. But Trout’s isn’t indulgent. It’s generous.
It gives voice to people who are usually spoken about, not spoken to. It breaks the mold of sanitized mental health narratives. And it challenges the myth that faith only comes to the already-faithful.
Perhaps more than anything, Up All Night is a reminder that so many people around us are living complicated, beautiful, painful, and redemptive stories we’ll never see unless they’re brave enough to write them down.
Trout did. And the result is a book that makes you laugh, ache, and think—often all in the same paragraph.
A Quiet Invitation to Be Honest
In one of the final chapters, Trout says something that lingers long after the last page:
And that, perhaps, is what Up All Night ultimately offers: not a cure, not a conclusion—but a kind of visibility that many of us are still searching for.
This book is for the misfits. The overthinkers. The quiet ones. The ones who’ve loved deeply and lost quietly. The ones who don’t always say the right thing, but who feel everything.
It’s for anyone who’s ever wished they could go back and hug their younger self—and now finally can, by turning the page.
Up All Night: An Aspie’s Memoir of Chasing Girls in Quicksand is available now on Amazon and through Christian Faith Publishing . For more information, visit [richtroutmemoir.com].
Because sometimes the story that saves you… It isn’t fiction. It’s just finally being told.