A deeply personal memoir about a life separated by a single night. On February 19, 2000, seventeen-year-old Justin Ridgeway lost his father in an act of violence that permanently changed his family and the course of his life.

But this is not simply a story about tragedy. Moving between childhood memories, family, music, grief, love, adulthood, fatherhood, and the imperfect nature of memory itself, After and Before explores the life that existed on both sides of that dividing line. It is a story about the boy Justin was, the man JC became, and the people who helped carry him from one to the other.

Originally written so his daughter could one day know the family and the grandfather she never had the chance to meet, After and Before became something larger: an attempt to preserve the ordinary moments that survive alongside the extraordinary ones, and to understand how a life can be forever divided without being defined by the thing that divided it.