With daring subtext, this book firmly implicates readers to unpack our complicated relationships to power: how we give it up, how it gets taken away, and who gets to wield it. It’s the most constant of our battles. Through the start of his career, he sheds pieces of himself along the way, learning how to meld and blend in to the detriment of his self-realization, which eventually comes with hard-won self-reliance and comfortable aloneness where painful isolation once lived. As he attends college and starts to build his confidence, he shares the destructive choices that lead to an eruption of violence after an intimate encounter turns death-defying. In four remarkable and well-crafted acts, Saeed examines his identity and shows us the ways in which society eliminates gay Black men’s experiences from predominately white spaces, especially in the South. In his coming-of-age story, Saeed Jones shows us how he had to, how others forced him to, and how we are all constantly in a fight for existence. It is to be invited into a gratifying narrative of reclaiming trauma and pain and creating security, control, and a sense of self. To read a memoir is to increase my empathy and expand commonality, and to read How We Fight for Our Lives is to conjoin someone’s ferocious becoming with a bracing readerly imperative. I read memoirs to get glimpses into others’ lives, peek into windows on houses I can never live in, and explore human truths and realities far removed from my own.
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