“I felt that the book was actually holding me,” writes Jones. It’s like he’s discovered a new language - something about himself that he can finally name. But then he lands on James Baldwin’s Another Country, and he revels in its unapologetic descriptions of queer desire and romantic love between men. At first, he casts about without much success, dipping into and then casually rejecting Toni Morrison’s murky sentences in Tar Baby and being turned off by Alice Walker’s overly detailed descriptions of the female body in The Color Purple. While his single mother is away at work during the day, Jones spends his time at home alone alternating between covetously spying on the sweaty white boys playing in the street outside his apartment window, and slowly making his way through his mother’s old paperback books. Thus the text itself becomes the scar, if scars were to be understood as evidence that a battle has been fought and won.Īcclaimed queer black poet Saeed Jones begins his memoir How We Fight for Our Lives as a 12-year-old boy facing down a hot Texas summer. That their suffering would have no choice but to absorb into their bodies without a scar to show the world. The best of these memoirs move us by daring to be profoundly specific, providing a necessary consolation to readers who might have believed until then that they were alone in the dark. THE QUEER COMING-OF-AGE MEMOIR is a weapon against erasure.
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