Again, race and sexual orientation shade this auto-creation. Like most memoirs, Jones’s is concerned with the construction of identity-with how its narrator resolves or at least reconciles himself to his own contradictions, and with the masks he wears and sets aside. Coherent “I”s, though, don’t just happen.
In a way, people do just happen, at least to themselves no one asks to be born. To be black, gay, and American, the book suggests, is to fight for one’s life.īut it becomes apparent that Jones also means these six words in a less literal sense. His title carries an edge of social critique. Jones writes of his mother and her heart condition, and of physical assault, economic hardship, and the floating threat of violence that men like him face. The title previews the book’s tone and also its content: urgent, immediate, matter of fact. “How We Fight for Our Lives” is a new memoir by Saeed Jones, an award-winning poet and a former BuzzFeed editor, who grew up black, gay, and Southern in the nineties and early two-thousands. 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.The prose in Saeed Jones’s memoir “How We Fight for Our Lives” shines with a poet’s desire to give intellections the force of sense impressions. 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.
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