Since I Laid My Burden Down
A Novel
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- € 12,99
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- € 12,99
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An uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with “more layered insight than the page count should allow” (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News).
DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?
A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness.
“Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel . . . a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire.” —Publishers Weekly
“It’s a true novel, chaptered, and bound, that not only holds its own as queer literature, with its unapologetically misanthropic narrative, but also expands upon it.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“An antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit.” —Mask Magazine
“Slim yet potently realized, with a lot to ponder.” —The Bay Area Reporter
“Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.” —Michelle Tea, author of Castle on the River Vistula
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel. The thin plot centers on DeShawn, a gay black man approaching middle age, returning to small-town Alabama after his uncle's death. He moves back in with his mother, a powerful and demanding Baptist preacher with a shrinking congregation. DeShawn's daily encounters send him down nostalgic rabbit holes about the men he has lost through death or other circumstances. He remembers his first lovers, the neighborhood boy who molested him, his stepfather's rages, and other experiences of his deeply constrained Southern upbringing in the 1980s. After fleeing to California at 18, DeShawn falls into an aimless string of sexual encounters and a counterculture lifestyle. While these vignettes do not build up to a coherent narrative, they are carefully drawn, occasionally very funny, and frequently affecting. The even-keeled, almost deadpan way Purnell lays out these tragedies, failures, and losses and the casually explicit tone offer a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire.
