There are countless roles to play: a college athlete, a preacher’s son, a high school crush finally willing to reciprocate. Each man offers Jones a chance at validation and reinvention. Jones finds “power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle,” and sex with strangers - “I buried myself in the bodies of other men,” he writes - becomes a sport at which he would surely win championships. After growing up believing that “being a black gay boy is a death wish,” he takes to openly gay collegiate life with a “ferocity” that alarms his college friends. They agree to meet for some meaningless sex, the kind that is scorched with meaning.
Despite the camp décor, the Botanist advertises himself as “straight-acting” on his online profile, which piques the interest of Jones, then a student at Western Kentucky University. Roughly midway through the poet Saeed Jones’s devastating memoir, “How We Fight for Our Lives,” we meet “the Botanist,” who lives in an apartment decorated with tropical trees, lion statuettes and Christmas ornaments dangling from Tiffany lamps. 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.HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES By Saeed Jones
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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