“Fragmented yet unified, direct yet elusive, How to Walk with Steve is a vivid memoir about family and geography, obligation and freedom. Fromberg has a remarkable ability to inject meaning into silence, into the cracks between sections, into all the things that remain unsaid.” 

–Brett Biebel, author of 48 Blitz 

“How to Walk with Steve is an inviting, conversational, and deeply personal portrait of a man’s relationship with his brother across places and across time. Full of humor, honesty, and surprise, Fromberg’s carefully crafted memoir shows the challenges and obligations—and also the faith and love—that connect siblings through the years.” 

–Scott Kenemore, author of Lake of Darkness 

“Fully aware of his brother’s oblique brilliance as well as his most upsetting tics, Fromberg presents the string of decisions, unforced errors, and well-meaning efforts that he made along the way to adulthood. He is as unsparing to himself as he is to those around him, and the effect is both agonizing and hilarious.” 

–Valerie Block, author of Was It Something I Said?

“Robert Fromberg’s poignant memoir details the painful ordinariness of misery—even for the bright scion of an artistic family. The narrator’s experience of the Peoria landscape with its dull roads and trains and repetitive residential streets—and of jobs that involve repeated tasks—echo the description of Steve’s obsessions and compulsions. In this way, Fromberg normalizes Steve’s behavior and brings him fully into the range of common experience. Over time, the writer grows beyond merely accepting responsibility for his brother; he comes to cherish him and the irreducible bond the brothers share when all else is stripped away. In refusing easy consolations, Fromberg has created a memoir that shines like polished bone.” 

–Patricia Eakins, author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories 

“Without a trace of affectation or adornment, Fromberg depicts the searing moments that made him who he is. Never have I read a more authentic, deeply-felt rendering of a child’s developing mind.” 

–Leslie Lawrence, author of The Death of Fred Astaire: And Other Essays from a Life Outside the Lines