Heartbreaking and uplifting. A coming-of-age story and a portrait of filial love. ( )

Compelling and Beautiful Memoir

I've followed Saeed Jones on Twitter for a while now and preordered this book. It happened to be released on my mother's birthday, the day I spend remembering her and grieving her loss. This book was hard to read in all the best ways. ( )

How We Fight for Our Lives is an autobiographical tale of a young man facing the challenges of his own sexual identity, the expectations and judgments of his traditional family, the pains of poverty, and the difficulties of racism. It's an OK book, but certainly nothing special. The writing is good and the presentation makes the story moderately interesting. It is not a "coming-of-age" book, but one that instead deals with the aftermath of coming-of-age, entering adulthood and negotiating a place within it.
I don't really have much to say about it other than that. I just sort of wish I had spent the time reading something more engaging and worthwhile. ( )

There's something soulless about the author until the last quarter of this small memoir. Jones' rage, anger and anxiety seem to have no source, at least not according to the history he presents. I found his self-destructive nihilism disturbing. His gift for writing is not as incandescent as I'd hoped, but in places he is quite eloquent. ( )

Wow ... I didn’t know what I was expecting from this memoir but this was so much more. It’s the story of the author’s life told by navigating through important moments of his life and the ultimate thread overall is his relationship with his beloved single mother.

You can clearly see Jones is a poet because even his prose is stunningly beautiful and evocative - literally brimming with feelings like desperation, confusion, longing, fear and grief - and listening to the audiobook in his own voice brings even more life to it. I thought his particular fear about the ramifications of being both Black and gay was very palpable in his words and I could feel it myself. It really broke my heart. I was so lost in his words that I didn’t realize it was already over, and I just wanted to know more.

This memoir truly deserves all the accolades it’s getting across the community and I hope everyone picks this up. I’m not much of a poetry reader but I definitely wanna go back and checkout his previous award winning poetry books. ( )