How We Fight for Our Lives By Saeed Jones

 

How We Fight for Our Lives

By Saeed Jones

This memoir traces Saeed Jones's journey from being a young closeted boy knowing he is gay and attracted to men to his coming out experience with his single mother and beyond her death. It is a riveting and unflinching portrait of what it is like to know who you are as a young queer black man having to hide those parts of yourself that make you who you are. This memoir explores what it means to be young and gay when you have nowhere to turn for answers to your questions, which leads you into sketchy, even dangerous, situations in the quest to connect to others like yourself in your search for touch, closeness, and love. It also explores the ways in which closeted queer youth make themselves numb to violence, and how they (we) turn ourselves into perpetrators of violence or danger out of self-preservation.

I could relate to this book on a soul level. I've lived some of these experiences and could picture myself in the others, acting in stupid and dangerous ways just to feel close to someone when it seems like the world is against you. Saeed's coming out experience with his family reminded me of my own, though his connection with his mother was not like mine. But the loss he feels when she gets sick and dies hit me deep in the gut and heart. I teared up more than once. The prose really had me in it with him. My favorite part about this memoir is that Jones held nothing back, displaying all of the unsavory parts of being a young gay man. It is a raw and deeply moving account that had me gripped the entire time.

How We Fight for Our Lives was an easy 5 star book for me.