Jones talks a little about the Black experience too, and I appreciated learning about the specific challenges for a gay Black man in America. That was a big turn-off (ha ha!) for me with this book. Unless you're writing porn (which is fine if it's labelled as such) then I don't see the merit in adding graphic sex situations. I don't see the need to talk graphically about having many sex partners, whether someone is gay, straight, or lesbian. Had Saeed Jones left it at those questions and feelings, I would have liked this book more. Wondering if there is something inherently bad and wrong about you. Worrying that people will hate you if they find out. I can appreciate and identify with the questions and insecurities of growing up gay and feeling you're different. This book was similar to I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyoncé, another coming out memoir by a young black man that described a lot of sex acts.
The first part? Well.! What the heck is it with some of these coming out memoirs by gay men that have to tell you about all the dick they've had? As a lesbian, I definitely do not enjoy hearing about dick. The author writes beautifully and the second part of the book is pretty much a song of love and gratitude towards his mother. 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. 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.īlending poetry and prose, Jones has developed a style that is equal parts sensual, beautiful, and powerful-a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze.
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 mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Haunted and haunting, Jones’s memoir tells the story of 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. From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.
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