How We Fight For Our Lives

This is a powerful memoir of a gay Black man growing up with a single mother in a religious family, exploring all the ways that it is so difficult for the author to accept himself in a society that doesn't accept him. It's a beautiful and emotional journey that reads both like a love letter to his mother, and a journal entry to himself. I wish I had something more substantive to say, but unfortunately I'm catching up on books I forgot to review and I read this many months ago :(

Wow ... I didn't know what I was expecting from this memoir but this was so much more. It's the story of the author's life told by navigating through important moments of his life and the ultimate thread overall is his relationship with his beloved single mother.

You can clearly see Jones is a poet because even his prose is stunningly beautiful and evocative - literally brimming with feelings like desperation, confusion, longing, fear and grief - and listening to the audiobook in his own voice brings even more life to it. I thought his particular fear about the ramifications of being both Black and gay was very palpable in his words and I could feel it myself. It really broke my heart. I was so lost in his words that I didn't realize it was already over, and I just wanted to know more.

This memoir truly deserves all the accolades it's getting across the community and I hope everyone picks this up. I'm not much of a poetry reader but I definitely wanna go back and checkout his previous award winning poetry books.

Quick read and not as dense of a memoir than I'm used to. It's heartbreaking reading about the possible painful experiences gay men, and especially black gay men go through as a means of coming into themselves and their sexuality.

Huge trigger warnings regarding SA/physical abuse so be cautious.

One star taken off for the reading experience. The story jumps back and forth often to different points in time which was difficult to follow.