This is an important coming-of-age story that's also a collection of tiny but significant joys. It is the story of a man who lost a mother who was a force of nature and whom readers will grow to love and respect. In every event there is truth, which he chronicles and shares, but there is also the possibility of a beautiful phrase, and he always delivers. Jones writes with the confidence of a veteran novelist and the flare of an accomplished poet. While there is a lot to unpack here, there is also a lot to celebrate. How We Fight for Our Lives, much like the man who wrote it, is full of fear but also brave enough to overcome that fear with sheer will. a touching, heartfelt memoir that isn't afraid to delve deep into the darkest corners of familial drama and violent, racially charged sexual encounters.
Read Full Review >Įxtremely personal, emotionally gritty, and unabashedly honest, How We Fight for Our Lives is an outstanding memoir that somehow manages a perfect balance between love and violence, hope and hostility, transformation and resentment. It is a tale of self-making that gives its last pages to Jones’s mom, and spends its most beautiful language on his love for her. But there’s a way in which the book also refutes its own premise. How We Fight for Our Lives, the two main concerns of which are Jones’s coming of age and his mother’s death, often feels like a complicated working-through of this guilt. Jones’s prose, though, shines with a poet’s desire to give intellections the force of sense impressions. There is a confidence in refusing to reach for mythic analogues. How We Fight for Our Lives doesn’t belabor Jones’s learning, or his love of language, even as biographical details (he was a speech champion and a star student he went to graduate school in creative writing) hint at what literature means to him. The narrator’s fear and desire swirl into a power fantasy, a vision of subjugating those who would subjugate him. 'Being a black gay boy is a death wish.' This fatalism, which exists in contrast to Jones’s uncommon openness and aesthetic ravening, is wrenching. One gets the impression that Jones relates to an artist formerly known as himself. He often feels doomed and spectral, and yet his writing activates the body. 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.
To be black, gay, and American, the book suggests, is to fight for one’s life. His title carries an edge of social critique.
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