Moore's memoir traces a coming of age in Camden, New Jersey, where he was raised by teenage parents in a crowded household marked by poverty, his father's violence, and the sustaining care of his mother, grandmother, aunts, and church. Bullied for being perceived as gay, he survived an attack at fourteen in which neighborhood boys doused him with gasoline and tried to set him alight — the fire of the title — and at nineteen he survived a heart attack. Moving through Seton Hall, graduate work, and organizing, he reckons with Black masculinity, queer desire, faith, and the fear that shadowed the AIDS years. The book closes with the writer and Black Lives Matter activist he became, arguing that survival is communal and that freedom has to be imagined and built for those who live on society's edges.
Author: Darnell L. Moore · Original publisher: Nation Books (New York), 2018
