Culture
Christopher Fiorello is walking 3,800 miles to get ‘Closer to Home’
By: Emily Votaw
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – It’s early on a crisp September day and I’m driving far out of cell service to meet writer Christopher Fiorello.
Fiorello is several hundred miles into a several thousand mile trip across the United States – a journey he’s making on foot. He left Brooklyn on June 18, and his destination is roughly 3,800 miles away, in Santa Barbara. He plans to complete the trip within a year.
Along the way he’s asking people he meets about what makes them feel at home where they are, as Americans. The insights he gathers will shape a book and podcast called Closer to Home.
When I pick him up in Amesville, he’s admirably cheerful (“I’ve learned to hide my exhaustion,” he later tells me) and surprisingly energetic, though he has a troubling irregularity in his gait, and he’s visibly exhausted.
There’s a kind of quiet nobility to what he’s doing. He’s not a medicant monk, but he’s as close to one as I will probably ever meet. Fiorello is aware of the reverence people have for what he’s doing, but he also has no illusions about the reality of this undertaking.
“I’m not sure I’ll be a demonstrably better person for having done it,” he says. “I mean, I could have probably spent this year doing something that was equally nourishing and didn’t involve early onset arthritis.”
Walking across the country is something Fiorello has wanted to do for a while. Really, it was born from what was basically a daydreaming session six years ago, when Fiorello’s life was very different.
He was living in New York City – a place that had felt like home for a while. Until it didn’t.
“I was burned out,” he says. “ I felt like I was living the life I was supposed to be living, and doing the things that I should be doing.”
But what about the things he wanted to do? Fiorello made a list of those things, and walking across the country was one of them.
“It was born from this feeling of really not liking America,” he says. “And wanting to feel like I belonged here.”
An elusive quest for belonging
The Fiorellos are from New York.
The family was based there a long time, but a few years before Christopher was born, they began to drift out to Kansas City, one by one, until Christopher’s mother was the last hold out on the East Coast. When she got pregnant and was facing the prospect of being a single mother thousands of miles away from her immediate family, she reluctantly moved out west, and that’s where Christopher grew up.
Being New Yorkers, Fiorello’s family stuck out culturally. For Christopher personally, there was the cultural component, but he’s also part Yemeni, which made him stand out even more in the primarily white Kansas City.
He says he didn’t think a lot about this as a kid, until 9/11. At the time, Fiorello was just 12 years old. Suddenly, he was being brutally bullied by kids that he’d thought were his friends. Fiorello survived by “being a joke.”
“I really focused on making people laugh at my expense,” he says. “I had developed the ability to make a fool of myself to avoid worse punishment than ridicule. And so I just kind of channeled that into being a clown and getting as much attention as I could.”
His mother had married a man from rural Kansas with the last name Guggisberg, so Christopher started going by “Googy.”. Googy pulled stunts, drank a lot, and generally did whatever it took to be a clown for his classmates.
By the time he was a senior in high school, the facade wore thin.
“I had not cultivated any opinions,” he says. “I think it didn’t serve me to have a perspective. It served me to be what people wanted me to be.”
College presented the perfect opportunity to leave “Googy” behind.
Fiorello went to college outside of L.A. because it was “almost as far as I could get (from Kansas City) without dropping into the ocean.”
After graduating, Fiorello moved frequently, driven by an elusive need for connection.
A stint in Beirut initially seemed to satisfy that quest. For the first time ever, he says he felt like he was “part of the tribe.”
“It was like, ‘oh yeah, you’re one of us. You’re an Arab,’” he recalls. “I was like, ‘well, I don’t speak very good Arabic.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. Your blood is Arabic. You’re an Arab.’ That felt great.”
However, in time, that good feeling faded. Partly because Fiorello couldn’t speak Arabic very well, but also because his family was thousands of miles away.
“And just culturally, I’m not very Arab. I’m very American. So I stuck out and couldn’t navigate it very well.”
The rhythm of Closer to Home
Now, Fiorello walks in eight-day stretches, resting for three days to write, restock, and recover. Strangers often offer help—food, water, showers—drawn by the audacity of his journey.
“On one hand, I’m a brown guy, I’m solo, I smell bad,” he says. “I’m either carrying a backpack with stuff dangling off of it, or I’m pushing a stroller full of plastic bags. I mean, these are not generally the attributes of somebody that everyone wants to talk to in America.”
Yet, everything changes when people learn about what he’s doing.
So much so, in fact, that Fiorello says it can be hard to get people to pivot from asking about his journey to talking about theirs. After all, the project is about talking to Americans about what makes them feel at home.
Fiorello said his findings are remarkably consistent regardless of whether he’s talking to people in urban or rural settings. People feel at home where they are for many reasons: a sense of connection to the physical environment, a commitment to the concept of a community; but Fiorello says that family – biological or chosen – is a constant theme.
He recalls talking with a police officer he met in West Virginia who said he’d never felt at home anywhere, until he had kids. Now, he said he feels at home where his kids are.
Equally, he’s found this sentiment about “chosen family.”
“This sense of, ‘I’ve got my artists here,’ or ‘I’ve got my weirdos, ‘or this is where all my farmer friends are,” he says.
Fiorello says feeling at home isn’t as simple as just being where your family is, but that generally “People feel at home where the people who know them and love them unconditionally are.”
Considering this, it makes sense that his destination is Santa Barbara—home to his fiancée and the life he hopes to build. Even so, Fiorello knows belonging isn’t tied to geography alone.
“Maybe I’m asking too much of a place,” he muses. “Or maybe feeling at home is an inside job.”
Follow along with Fiorello’s journey on TikTok, Instagram, and sign up for his newsletter at this link. Help fund his trip via this GoFundMe.