How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

“Even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.” Jones documents the price he paid for those secrets, including the shame that accompanied his discoveries of self and sexuality.

The “fight” in the title is partly about the fight with society at large, but it is mainly about the fight within the author himself. There is a lot of subtlety in these familial relations: the son not willing to recognize the implications of his loving mother’s heart condition, the mother struggling with her son’s sexuality. He and his mother were both damned to hell, according to his grandmother, who nonetheless loved both of them. 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.A coming-of-age memoir marks the emergence of a major literary voice.Ī prizewinning poet, Jones ( Prelude to Bruise, 2014) tends less toward flights of poetic fancy and more toward understated, matter-of-fact prose, all the more powerful because the style never distracts from the weight of the story: the sexual awakening and struggle for identity of a young black man raised in Texas by a single mother, a Buddhist, who herself was the daughter of an evangelical Christian. 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.Īn award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that's as beautiful as it is 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 family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about 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. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times The Washington Post NPR Time The New Yorker O, The Oprah Magazine Harper's Bazaar Elle BuzzFeed Goodreads and many more.

From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives-winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award-is a 'moving, bracingly honest memoir' ( The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones