The New York Times columnist's memoir of a boyhood in Gibsland, Louisiana — a small, informally segregated town where the cemetery fence still divided Black graves from white. The youngest of five sons of a determined mother who worked her way to a teaching degree, Blow was seven when an older cousin's sexual abuse split his childhood into silence and shame, and the book follows the long work of carrying that secret through Grambling State University and into his profession. He has said he wrote it after two young boys, bullied for perceived homosexuality, took their own lives in 2009 — to give such children a language for the pain. Published September 23, 2014.
Author: Charles M. Blow · Original publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston), 2014
