Jones is fighting to become himself in a haunted house, thick with cultural expectation and the words of other black, gay authors, most of them dead. 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. 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.
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