Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears.
The 'I' it seems doesn't exist until we are able to say, 'I am no longer yours.'" We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. "We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. "People don't just happen," writes Saeed Jones. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times The Washington Post NPR Time The New Yorker O, The Oprah Magazine Harper's Bazaar Elle BuzzFeed Goodreads and many more. He's explicit in his accounts of using sex to humiliate himself and his partners, especially the straight white men he seduces.From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives-winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award-is a "moving, bracingly honest memoir" ( The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power. By the time he gets a full scholarship to Western Kentucky University for his debate skills, Jones is a roiling vessel of shame, need and anger. Throughout How We Fight for Our Lives, readers feel the tension of Jones' adolescent and college years, as he's trying to figure out how to be. And one day, if you're lucky, your life and death will become some artist's new 'project.'" Jones recalls his younger self realizing that, " Being a black gay boy is a death wish. Granted, Jones' public high school is open-minded enough to host a touring production of The Laramie Project, the play about the hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard but what Jones takes away from that performance is that he'd better closet himself even more securely at school. Jones' memoir effectively deep-sixes any illusions I had that it must've been a little easier in recent decades to come of age as a queer black boy in Texas. It's sometimes hard to read and harder to put down. How We Fight for Our Lives is at once explicitly raunchy, mean, nuanced, loving and melancholy. It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders Saeed Jones On His Memoir, 'How We Fight For Our Lives' - And How He Fought For His
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