How We Fight for Our Lives
A Memoir
-
-
4.5 • 109 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’”
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. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.
An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
How We Fight for Our Lives is a powerful, startling, and brave coming-of-age memoir. Growing up black and gay in Texas, poet Saeed Jones learns to adapt his persona to blend in with whoever is around. The struggle between his sexuality and his family’s religious values and social expectations forces him choose between parts of his own identity. Jones portrays every element in his story—including pivotal sexual experiences and experiences of racism—with the same blunt, intelligent honesty. Throughout, he includes emotionally raw yet beautiful poems inspired by these experiences. The introspection and empathy of this heartfelt self-revelation will make you want to live your most authentic, true-to-yourself life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Jones (Prelude to Bruise) explores sexual identity, race, and the bond between a mother and child in a powerful memoir filled with devastating moments. As a gay African-American boy growing up in Texas, Jones struggled to find his way. In 1998, at age 12, "I thought about being gay all the time," he writes, but at home the subject was taboo. Here, Jones candidly discusses his coming of age, his sexual history, and his struggle to love himself. He describes engaging in destructive behavior in college, including repeated relations with a sadistic, racist man, and their encounters graphically illustrate how sex and race can be used as weapons of hate. Jones writes that, at that grim time in his life, he appeared to others to be a happy young man: "Standing in front of the mirror, my reflection and I were like rival animals, just moments away from tearing each other limb from limb." Jones beautifully records his painful emergence into adulthood and, along the way, he honors his mother, a single parent who struggled to support him financially, sometimes emotionally, but who loved him unconditionally until her death in 2011. Jones is a remarkable, unflinching storyteller, and his book is a rewarding page-turner.
Customer Reviews
Strange memoir
This memoir seems confused. It glorifies risky sexual behavior in a such a way that seems like it could appeal as more-or-less purely erotic material for adults, while meanwhile being entirely inappropriate for the (seemingly) intended audience of adolescents.
There are numerous scenes framed as full of dramatic weight that get disappointingly deflated almost every time, like Lucy pulling the football away right when Charlie Brown’s about to kick it.
Finally, Jones contradicts himself at some key moments, throwing the reader out of the narrative and into a liminal space of wondering whether to believe what feels logical, or what Saeed insists is true (despite evidence to the contrary). The most cogent example of this comes when Jones’s hookup with Daniel turns violent, which Jones rhetorically escalates to Daniel “trying to kill him” even though Jones requires no specific medical attention as a result of the encounter.
Therein lies the most interesting part of this memoir: Jones, in writing about his own adolescence, inadvertently and tacitly suggests he has never left it. Humans usually leave gross mischaracterizations and convenient lies and half-truths that “improve” a narrative behind, in their adolescence, as they grow older, but Jones would have been in his late 20s-early 30s when writing this, begging the question as to why the truth (which could still be poetically wrought!) was not enough.