Boy Erased
A Memoir
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4.1 • 288 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling memoir about identity, love and understanding. Now a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, directed by Joel Edgerton. "Every sentence of the story will stir your soul" (O Magazine).
The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality.
When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin. Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.
By confronting his buried past and the burden of a life lived in shadow, Garrard traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. At times heart-breaking, at times triumphant, this memoir is a testament to love that survives despite all odds.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Raw and revealing, Boy Erased is Garrard Conley's heart-wrenching memoir of his teenage experience with gay-conversion therapy. At 19, after he was outed to his Baptist-preacher father, Conley voluntarily entered a 12-step-like program. His story is one of struggling to reconcile his faith and his unwavering love for his family with the reality of the therapists' increasingly brutal and confusing techniques. Even when things are at their most hopeless, Conley's strength, compassion, and forgiveness radiate off the page. We can't wait to see Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) play him in the film.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exceptionally well-written memoir, Conley recounts his brief but harrowing time attending Love in Action, an ex-gay ministry. After the man who raped him in college outs him to his Missionary Baptist parents, Conley enters a tailspin that results in seeking conversion therapy to both placate his parents and find his own peace. He nicely weaves the account of his two weeks at Love in Action with stories from his earlier life to present a moving picture of the struggle to be gay or stop being gay in a conservative, southern Christian community. Particularly effective is the representation of his parents, who sincerely believe this is best for their son, and his recounting of this world slowly losing its grip on him. Other memoirs of ex-gay therapy survivors recount longer and more involved encounters with the process, but Conley offers enough for readers to understand the main concepts and methods of such groups. This timely addition to the debate on conversion therapy will build sympathy for both children and parents who avail themselves of it while still showing how damaging it can be.
Customer Reviews
Important, gripping, overwritten
Really glad this story is being told but if Mr. Conley wants to be a writer and not just a confessional-memoir one-hit wonder/overpaid speakers bureau type, he’s going to need to know when to ease off the imagery pedal, especially once the book sales spike again when the movie comes out and his novel has that much more pressure to sell. I don’t think I’ll ever find the concept of an afterimage interesting again, sis.
A powerful memoir
Book contains triggers: rape and sexuality
A painfully uncomfortable unapologetic memoir of going through ex-gay therapy that almost broke the author. Now it’s a motion picture that is going to make some people deny things like this ever happened; especially when so many strides have been made.
But with the world tilting back towards denial and unabashed hate, a book like this is an important touchstone to educate those who act rather than think. As we head into the 50th year after Stonwall, this book is as important as #Blacklivesmatter and #MeToo.
Melodramatic Indulgence
Garrard Conley is the luckiest man on earth — lucky that someone has paid him to make a movie version of this “memoir.” “Boy Erased” is an exercise in melodramatic indulgence. It reads for the most part like a compilation of juvenile notes the author made at a time of spiritual crisis, dominated by his struggle to come to terms with his sexual identity. The result is a painstaking beating of the dead horse of his emotions, rendered awkwardly and sometimes redundantly. Yes, there is an important message here about gay conversion therapy, but it could have been conveyed in probably half the pages. And there’s an additional message that apparently never sank in with the author: we sometimes imagine that we are victims of external forces when in truth we’re victims of our own weaknesses, of our own inability to swim against the current. Maybe with more conviction, the author wouldn’t have been pulled along and made so confused as he was. But all in all, there’s nothing particularly unique or interesting here. It’s a boring and poorly written book.