Katy Waldman Reviews Saeed Jones's Memoir for the New Yorker

Katy Waldman reviews Saeed Jones's new memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives (Simon & Schuster, this month), for the New Yorker. "His title carries an edge of social critique," writes Waldman. "To be black, gay, and American, the book suggests, is to fight for one’s life." More:

But it becomes apparent that Jones also means these six words in a less literal sense. “People don’t just happen,” he asserts. In a way, people do just happen, at least to themselves; no one asks to be born. Coherent “I”s, though, don’t just happen. 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. Again, race and sexual orientation shade this auto-creation. 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. He often feels doomed and spectral, and yet his writing activates the body, an irony he acknowledges in the poem that opens the book: a description of his mother dancing to Prince, “fingers snapping and snakes in her blood.” One gets the impression that Jones relates to an artist formerly known as himself.

Jones’s single mother looms large in “How We Fight for Our Lives.” She is beautiful, reads “three newspapers every day,” and can make “everyone in a room light up with laughter.” She conceived her son and continues to conceive him...

Read on at the New Yorker.