How We Fight for Our Lives

Starred review from June 17, 2019
Poet Jones (Prelude to Bruise) explores sexual identity, race, and the bond between a mother and child in a powerful memoir filled with devastating moments. As a gay African-American boy growing up in Texas, Jones struggled to find his way. In 1998, at age 12, “I thought about being gay all the time,” he writes, but at home the subject was taboo. Here, Jones candidly discusses his coming of age, his sexual history, and his struggle to love himself. He describes engaging in destructive behavior in college, including repeated relations with a sadistic, racist man, and their encounters graphically illustrate how sex and race can be used as weapons of hate. Jones writes that, at that grim time in his life, he appeared to others to be a happy young man: “Standing in front of the mirror, my reflection and I were like rival animals, just moments away from tearing each other limb from limb.” Jones beautifully records his painful emergence into adulthood and, along the way, he honors his mother, a single parent who struggled to support him financially, sometimes emotionally, but who loved him unconditionally until her death in 2011. Jones is a remarkable, unflinching storyteller, and his book is a rewarding page-turner.

September 1, 2019
Because memories evolve over time, grow fuzzy or distorted, and occasionally disappear, a compelling memoir must improve upon dry facts with poetic embellishment. As such, Jones, author of the poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise (2014), is well-suited to write in this nebulous genre. In quick, impactful chapters, Jones recounts his experiences growing up gay and Black in the South, the only child of a single mother who's Buddhist, a practice which complicates the relationship with his assiduously Christian grandmother. As he figures out how to negotiate these relationships, Jones draws poignant parallels between two important figures, James Byrd, Jr., a Black man killed by three white men in a truck, and Matthew Shepherd, a gay man murdered by a pair of straight men. An uncomfortable, defining moment of the memoir occurs when Jones accompanies a straight white man back home after a party and an altercation ensues, which Jones renders with gut-wrenching clarity and surprising sympathy. Jones' unabashed honesty and gift for self-aware humor will resonate with readers, especially those in search of a story that resembles their own.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 15, 2019
A coming-of-age memoir marks the emergence of a major literary voice. A prizewinning poet, Jones (Prelude to Bruise, 2014) tends less toward flights of poetic fancy and more toward understated, matter-of-fact prose, all the more powerful because the style never distracts from the weight of the story: the sexual awakening and struggle for identity of a young black man raised in Texas by a single mother, a Buddhist, who herself was the daughter of an evangelical Christian. He and his mother were both damned to hell, according to his grandmother, who nonetheless loved both of them. There is a lot of subtlety in these familial relations: the son not willing to recognize the implications of his loving mother's heart condition, the mother struggling with her son's sexuality. The "fight" in the title is partly about the fight with society at large, but it is mainly about the fight within the author himself. "I made myself a promise," he writes. "Even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own." Jones documents the price he paid for those secrets, including the shame that accompanied his discoveries of self and sexuality. "Standing in front of the mirror," he writes, "my reflection and I were like rival animals, just moments away from tearing each other limb from limb." One of them was the loving son and accomplished student; the other, a young man drawn toward denigrating and debilitating sexual encounters, devoid of love, with white men who objectified him as black and even with straight men. One almost killed him and made him feel like this is what he deserved. "This is that I thought it meant to be a man fighting for his life," writes Jones. "If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself." A memoir of coming to terms that's written with masterful control of both style and material.

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Starred review from August 1, 2019

In this highly anticipated memoir, writer and poet Jones (Prelude To Bruise) begins with the influence of James Baldwin and what it means to create an alternate version of oneself. He describes a childhood spent alternating between the suburbs of Dallas with his mother, and summers in Memphis with his evangelical grandmother. With lyrical writing, Jones shows the impact of lingering silence around sexuality; gay was an unspoken word in either home. This is all set against the backdrop of the deaths of James Byrd Jr. and Matthew Shepard in 1998--if being black can get you killed and so can being gay, what does it mean to be black and gay? Throughout, Jones tells of slipping away from his mother and grandmother, of wanting a sense of newfound freedom. While college allowed this, it came with a physical and mental cost. An underlying question is: What does it mean to become someone else? Jones answers this and more, distinguishing memory from the present moment in the process. Gripping chapters on the complicated relationship with his mother, and her life with a heart condition, make for moving reading. VERDICT An unforgettable memoir that pulls you in and doesn't let go until the very last page. [An editor's pick, see "Fall Fireworks," p. 24]--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019

Having triumphed with the knife-sharp Prelude to Bruise, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award and an NBCC finalist to boot, Buzzfeed staffer Jones here blends prose and poetry to tell the story of being young, black, and gay from the South. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.