How We Fight for Our Lives
From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.
Haunted and haunting, Jones’s memoir 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. 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 mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. 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.
Blending poetry and prose, Jones has developed a style that is equal parts sensual, beautiful, and powerful — a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. 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.
Author: Saeed Jones | Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Rating: 5 / 5
Just as some cultures have a hundred words for snow, there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a Black boy can lie awake at night.
I am not the first to say it, and I will not be the last: How We Fight for Our Lives is an incredible work of art. A memoir that truly stands apart — one that reaches into your heart and guts and squeezes. One that uses words more powerfully than almost any other. One that will stay with you for a long, long time.
Saeed Jones is a poet first, and I will never turn down the opportunity to read prose written by poets. But he doesn’t just say things that are beautiful, he says things that are important.
Saeed grew up in Texas with a single mother, who was wise and kind and also his best friend. But she also did not quite know how to be the particular type of supportive mother Saeed needed as he moved through adolescence as a gay teenager/young adult. She did her best, but Saeed spent much of his life feeling lonely all the same. And then she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.
Meanwhile, Saeed went to college and then grad school, seeking some sense of escape, purpose, comfort, solace in the bodies of other men. Many of whom were not good to him.
Looking back, I can see how someone might see me that night and argue that I had it coming. That I had a man like him coming. If that someone was America herself, I can understand how she might rattle off a warning: “That black boy has been too hungry for too long. One of these nights, he’s going to bite off more than he can chew.” I will say for myself: America, I did the best I could with what I was given.
I’m always the most impressed by memoirs written by people who are not household names. When Michelle Obama writes a memoir, you know why she is writing it; you know what makes her life worth recording. But when everyday people can take their lives and search through the pieces to find a narrative and meaning that makes other people feel connected to one another, as humans — that’s truly beautiful. And that’s what Saeed Jones does here.
One thing that I couldn’t help thinking as I read this (although it has nothing to do with the quality of the book or writing, just an interesting discussion point) is that even as a gay Black boy in the South, Saeed had no qualms about being sexual. He talks about sneaking away with his mother’s novels, swapping porn magazines with other boys and snuggling into bed with them in secret, and keeping clippings of scantily clad men in magazines in his books. I don’t think many young girls do this — I think they begin to feel their sexuality, but they refuse to explore it, because to do so would be “wrong” or shameful or embarrassing to admit, even to themselves. Saeed may have been told by society that his sexuality was wrong, but never that he should not have a sexuality at all.
I often “read” memoirs as audiobooks, and I almost always recommend it. But with this book, I strongly urge it. This is the first time in my life of many, many audiobooks where I actually rewound so that I could mark a bookmark at a certain quote to come back to later. Saeed’s delivery is emotional, cutting, and adds so much to the book itself — I guarantee it.
Do not miss this one.