Post punk

``Why aren't you dead, like your brothers?"

That's the question Michael Patrick MacDonald says he was often asked by readers of his 1999 bestseller, ``All Souls: A Family Story From Southie." It's the question that led him to write his new book, ``Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up From Under." The answer is surprising: The path to survival, then to maturity, led first through the world of punk rock music.

MacDonald, 40, grew up in two troubled housing projects: first in Columbia Point in Dorchester, then at Old Colony in South Boston. Helen MacDonald King, his mother, couldn't find a dependable man, despite two marriages and numerous boyfriends, and raised 10 children, mostly on welfare and what she could earn playing guitar and accordion in local bars.

The housing projects were beset with drugs and family violence. Death stalked the family. There were 11 kids in all. Patrick died in infancy. In 1979, David killed himself. In 1981, Kathleen became brain-damaged after falling off a roof. In 1984, Frankie was shot and killed in a bungled armored-car robbery. Less then a year later, Kevin, in prison for a jewelry-store robbery, was found hanged outside his cell.

With all this happening, MacDonald might have lost himself in drugs or crime, like Frankie and Kevin. Instead he dyed his hair pink and found solace in a world considered as weird by his peers and family as it was by his teachers at Boston Latin School.

Jumping turnstiles at Andrew or Broadway stations on the T, Michael had dropped out of school by 1980 and was fleeing Southie whenever he could. He haunted clubs in the Back Bay and elsewhere, and hung out with punk bands and fans. In his later teens, he immersed himself in the New York punk world, and traveled to London and Paris to follow his favorite bands. He wore the outrageous clothes and hairstyles the punk s affected, including a button that read ``In order to create, you must destroy." The book is full of names from the original 1980s punk scene: the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Dead Boys, Bad Brains, Mikey Dread, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Slits, and many others. Johnny Rotten, Patti Smith, and Joe Strummer have cameo appearances.

With their in-your-face band names, songs, and attire, the punk s in some adult eyes represented a scandalous nihilism and destructiveness. Even MacDonald's family thought he had gone bonkers. But for him, punk symbolized a smashing of the structure of poverty, violence, depression, and fatalism that dogged his family.

``If punk was not normal," he said, ``in the world I was coming from, normal meant doing coke and hating black people." In the punk world, ``there was no such thing as peer pressure. Everyone not only looked different, but if you said, `I don't do drugs,' they would say, `Oh, that's interesting.' "

The idea of a youth finding himself through rebel music might not seem startling -- isn't that what rock 'n' roll was always about? But in his life MacDonald sees it in more high-stakes terms. It wasn't just teen self-assertion; it was a desperate campaign of healing and self-preservation.

``I found a music that was expressing the things I wished I could express," said MacDonald, who lives in New York now but was in Boston last week for a visit. ``The anger, and angst, that I was feeling, I could vicariously express through the anger and alienation of punk. Like the button that said `In order to create, you must destroy,' subconsciously I was destroying everything I had come from, erasing as much as I could: South Boston, poverty, Irish heritage, all of that. I was doing things you wouldn't recommend to a kid, like being 13 years old in underground clubs with 20- and 21-year-olds. But it was saving my life."

The book also tells of 19-year-old MacDonald's eye-opening trip to western Ireland to look up his grandparents' relatives. There, in the ancient culture of defiant music and resistance to outside power, he found a historic background that helped make comprehensible his childhood world. ``Thank God for that trip," he said. ``The more I study that place, the more I understand my family."

MacDonald earned a GED certificate and spent six years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, studying juvenile justice and Irish history, without finishing a degree. By the 1990s, he was working as a paid community organizer, in both black and white neighborhoods, trying to help youths survive the pathologies that had claimed his siblings. He helped organize Boston's original gun-buyback program and founded the South Boston Vigil Group, where people who had lost family members to drugs or violence could share their experiences with others.

In the late 1990s, he met Deanne Urmy, at the time an editor at Boston's Beacon Press, who was impressed by his story, his community work, and his fiery drive. ``If he could do what he had done already," said Urmy, who edited ``All Souls" for Beacon and ``Easter Rising" for Houghton Mifflin, ``he could surely write a book."

``When `All Souls' came out," said MacDonald, ``the response was unbelievable. At book signings, people would get in line and tell me their own family traumas. Someone had committed suicide, or their father was an alcoholic who beat their mother. They'd say, `I spent my whole life denying this stuff happened.' " He is working on a screenplay for the movie version of the book, which is to be directed by Ron Shelton.

MacDonald has made a career of writing, public speaking, and advocating for troubled youths. He says he has many books in him, and hopes to write fiction about Irish history. Apart from Kathleen, his siblings are doing well, and Seamus and Stephen live near him in Brooklyn. His mother, Helen, survived as well. She lives today with her son Joe in Golden, Colo., and takes care of Kathleen. MacDonald himself is single and lives alone.

Though salvation through rock makes a lively story, MacDonald insists there's no panacea in ``Easter Rising." At readings of ``All Souls," he said, ``among teachers and guidance counselors, there was that question: `How did you make it out?' What they were saying is, `We want to find what you had that got you out of this ghetto situation so we can bottle it and feed it to kids.' But there is no one formula. Some people make it out through the path I didn't take -- finish at Boston Latin School, go on to Harvard. That's a great route, but my route was more transgressive."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.