A coming-of-age memoir in vignettes by the poet Saeed Jones: a young, Black, gay man raised in the South by his mother and grandmother, fighting — in the book's terms — to carve out a place for himself within his family, within his country, and within his own hopes and fears. Jones charts boyhood and adolescence, the long negotiation of his sexuality with the mother he adored and could not tell, encounters tender and violent, and the making of a writer, each short chapter a discrete act of self-definition. The memoir won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the Stonewall Book Award.
Author: Saeed Jones · Original publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York), 2019
