Most days, after Mom headed to her job at the airport, I would stay inside our apartment, stationed by the window. I was twelve years old and I had just finished the sixth grade. Everything already looked like it was scorched, dead, or well on its way. It didn’t occur to me to be nervous about the occasional wall of white smoke on the horizon that summer. Day after day of my T-shirt sticking to the sweat on my lower back, the smell of insect repellant gone slick with sunscreen, the air droning with the hum of cicadas, dead yellow grass cracking under every footstep, asphalt bubbling on the roads. The waxy-faced weatherman on Channel 8 said we had been above 90 degrees for ten days in a row. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Ĭhapter 1: May 1998 1MAY 1998LEWISVILLE, TEXAS 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. 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.
Jones tells the story of 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. Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. 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. “Every single living half-grown and grown-up body needs to read this book.” -JACQUELINE WOODSON “An astonishing, unparalleled memoir.A rhapsody in the truest sense of the word.” -ROXANE GAY “Jones’s voice and sensibility are so distinct that he turns one of the oldest of literary genres inside out and upside down.” -NPR’S FRESH AIR “A moving, bracingly honest memoir that reads like fevered poetry.” - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW One of the most anticipated books of Fall 2019-as selected by O, The Oprah Magazine Marie Claire Entertainment Weekly Time The Millions Refinery29 Good Housekeeping and many more. WINNER OF THE 2019 KIRKUS PRIZE IN NONFICTIONĪ NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2019 SELECTION
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