How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

Overview

After the Escape: Barnes & Noble Interview with Sharon Olds

As readers of Sharon Olds's poetry, we're used to knowing, or feeling that we know, what's going on in Olds's life. The "I" in Olds's poems is meant to be one who is close to or identical to the Olds that lives, breathes, chronicles, and discovers what she thinks by writing about it.

Indeed, since her first book, Satan Says, came out in 1980, Olds has made her career as a poet of the personal, forging a language of intimate detail that includes subjects as private as douching and ovaries, as well as tackling sex, love, marriage, and her struggles with her parents. Now, in Stag's Leap, her latest book of poetry, Olds records the months before and after the dissolution of her thirty-year marriage.

Sometimes, when recording things as small as the movement of her gaze, her poems feel immediate. They capture the kind of upending moments that make divorce surreal -- like the moment when furniture leaves a house or the moment when the person being left actually comforts the person who is leaving. But even as these poems feel immediate, they have been delayed by time. Olds has waited fifteen years -- half as long as her marriage existed -- to put the book together.

Olds, who teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU, and who helped found NYU's writing workshops for veterans at Goldwater Hospital, spoke with me by telephone about how she composed her new collection and what consolation art can offer in the face of loss. --Tess Taylor

The Barnes & Noble Review: These poems intimately trace the year after a divorce, season by season, in close detail, but then end with a sequence that moves quite far away, a kind of zooming out that lets the reader know that the construction of the book has been years in the making. How did the actual book come together? How did you craft this work?

Sharon Olds: Well, when I put a book together, I look for what I think are the best poems; I guess I ask them to tell me, when I spread them out on the dining room floor, what their order is, how I should make an outer organization to reflect them. I wrote many many poems about the parting, and so, much later, when I began to think of making a book of those poems, I found a lot from that first year. I suppose the construction of the book felt like an approximation of a chronology. First, I went month by month, and then I wanted to pull the lens back and go season by season, moving from shock to grief, and then pulling out to years after. Some of those poems were written just a few years ago, but most of them were within the few years following.

BNR: Indeed, you've been gathering these poems for some time. How long has it been?

SO: I said to our kids -- our grown children -- that I wouldn't put a book together for ten years; I thought it's weird enough having a parent that's a family poet! So I told them it won't be for ten years, and it turned out to be longer than that. It's been fifteen years, and these poems were written over the fifteen years, in a spirit of slow learning.

It takes a while to get over thirty years! When a poem came to me, I would write it in terms of itself, not thinking about whether or not it would eventually be in a book. And when that last poem came along, that poem of release, I didn't know it would be the last poem in the book. But later, when I began to put Stag's Leap together, I saw it should be the last one. BNR: You just mentioned your considerations for your kids. I wonder also about your considerations for your ex-husband. For instance, your title, Stag's Leap. Were you at all worried that it would seem like a jab at him, that he would seem somehow old?

SO: I don't think the picture on the wine bottle is old! I don't think of stags as old. The title seemed to me to fit -- but I asked people in different walks of life about it. Most people said the title made them think of a deer getting away. I guess I thought of the male deer leaping, of the male deer as a beautiful leaper. In the dictionary, I don't find an age for "stag." It is an ageless male -- a grown one, surely, but not an old one.

If I hadn't written that poem, "Stag's Leap," and it hadn't appeared in The New Yorker, and the owner of the winery hadn't sent me a big bottle of Stags' Leap Cabernet Sauvignon -- who knows?! As it was it just felt like the right title and title poem. It contains a line "When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from?"

All the poems, of course, are from the point of view of the speaker in the poems -- the "I." But I didn't want the book to be too lopsided, I wanted it to reflect some understanding of -- I wanted it to sing, insofar as it could, both members of the former couple.

BNR: In Stag's Leap you're sharing personal moments, but you've always been a poet of the personal -- all the way from Satan Says to One Secret Thing. But divorce is so intimate. In this book, you write that you fear you've angered the god of love, that you've failed at love -- and you experience moments of seeming self-incrimination. "I did not know him / and I did not work not to lose him / and I've lost him" you write in one poem. Were these poems more terrifying than others to write?

SO: Well, as to blaming myself: I think a marriage is fifty-fifty. When it doesn't work we must look to each person for half the cause.

As for it being scary: I find writing much more pleasurable than scary. And when we are trying to write truthfully, true to the poem -- whether literally, or an imaginative truth -- we aren't writing to look good.

What's thrilling is when we can write a line -- whether it's good or bad about the self -- with some truth to it. This is beyond looking good, it's kind of the opposite of that. Instead it's about something else, you're about something else. In a way it's not personal at all. When you're writing you're not exactly in control and you have a story you want to tell and music you're hearing -- it's almost a different level beyond the self.

In my poems, the qualities that I have to work against are self-pity, sentimentality, and too many adjectives! When I'm rewriting, I'm on guard against those. But no, this wasn't more scary than the others. And to me, woe over imperfections doesn't overwhelm the feeling that perhaps I've written a line that is true.

BNR: It sounds like this truth is a kind of consolation. What does art offer a grieving process like the one you've been through? At one point you write, "but from within my illusion of him. I could not see him, or know him?" and later you write "I did not have the art / or there's no art/ to find the mind's construction in the face." Does art actually help us see something as messy as a divorce more clearly?

SO: I don't know. In ways, in moments. You do want to make something that might have some value, some usefulness. It's a social art. And, for us narrative poets, it's a kind of record, a vision record. I guess when I'm writing, or talking to a close friend, insights can emerge. But while I'm writing a first draft, I'm pretty much completely focused on the emerging poem, the making. Each of those poems reflects some understanding, or some reading of an understanding. But equally or more important is music, rhythm, shape.

I don't know what art does -- though in our NYU outreach writing workshop programs in hospitals, schools, a prison, I have seen again and again that making a work of art is extremely valuable to communities, to selves.

But how do you know what art does? You write. Over years you get stronger. Your living shows you things, your writing also shows you things. You're lucky to be well and alive and writing. And you go on.

--September 24, 2012

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781508297468
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 5.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. Jones is a cohost of BuzzFeed’s morning show, AM to DM, and previously served as BuzzFeed’s LGBT editor and Culture editor. Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. He earned a BA at Western Kentucky University and an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark. He lives in New York City and tweets @TheFerocity.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: May 1998 1MAY 1998LEWISVILLE, TEXAS
The waxy-faced weatherman on Channel 8 said we had been above 90 degrees for ten days in a row. 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. It didn’t occur to me to be nervous about the occasional wall of white smoke on the horizon that summer. Everything already looked like it was scorched, dead, or well on its way.

I was twelve years old and I had just finished the sixth grade. Most days, after Mom headed to her job at the airport, I would stay inside our apartment, stationed by the window. Cody and his younger brother, Sam, two white boys who lived a few apartment buildings over from us, were always playing catch in the parking lot, though I never joined them. I wasn’t good at throwing the ball and it was too hot for me to go out and pretend.

When I wasn’t at my perch, acting like I wasn’t watching them, I would flip through Mom’s old paperback books. So far, I had tried out Tar Baby and The Color Purple, both unsuccessfully. Toni Morrison’s sentences were like rivers with murky bottoms. They didn’t obey the rules I was learning in school. When I stepped in, I couldn’t see my feet; I retreated back to the shore. Alice Walker lost me because, a few pages in, some girl was talking about the color of her pussy. I figured the book didn’t have much more to offer me after that.

Today I tried again. I picked up a worn copy of Another Country by James Baldwin, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and started reading. A sad man walks through the streets of New York City late one winter night. He goes into a jazz club looking for someone or something but doesn’t say why.

Minutes pooled into hours. Black people sleeping with white people. Men kissing men, then kissing women, then kissing men again. Every few pages, I would look up from the book and peek at our apartment’s front door. Mom wasn’t home from work yet and I felt like I would get in trouble if she saw me reading this book. I went into my bedroom, with our cocker spaniel, Kingsley, trailing behind me, and I closed the door.

The novel turned me on. I didn’t know books were capable of anything like this. Until now, I had liked reading but it was just something you did. A good thing, like drinking water on a hot day, but nothing special. Holding Another Country in my hands, I felt that the book was actually holding me. Sad, sexy, and reeking of jazz, the story had its arm around my waist. I could walk right into the scene, take off my clothes, and join one of the couples in bed. I could taste their tongues.

About a third of the way into the novel, I found a Polaroid tucked between the pages like a bookmark. It was a picture of a man I had never seen before. He didn’t resemble anyone in my family, but, for all I knew, he could have been a distant cousin or uncle. He was leaning against a sedan with his arms crossed and an odd smile on his face, as if the person holding the camera had just told him an inside joke. Or maybe this man was doing the telling. The smile felt intimate, inappropriate, like a hand sliding down where it should not be.

Someone had written “Jackson, Mississippi, 1982” on the back, but I could’ve figured that out on my own. The man was dressed like an extra in a Michael Jackson video. He had on a knit sweater and black, acid-washed jeans that were way too tight. I could see the whites of his socks. And I knew he was in Mississippi because of the red dust all over his sneakers. On a trip to Mississippi with my aunt once, I’d seen that dirty redness on every car, lapping at the sides of houses like flood tides, and all over the loafers I was wearing. “That’s what Mississippi does to you,” my aunt had said when she saw my shoes. I kept on trying to use one foot to brush red dirt off the other, only making things worse.

I decided I didn’t like the man in the picture. The dirt on his shoes irritated me, and the longer I looked at his smile, the more I felt like he was looking directly at me. Not at the camera in 1982, but at me, sixteen years later. He grinned like he knew something about me, a punch line I hadn’t figured out yet.

When Mom came home from work, she headed straight into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water from the Ozark jug. That was part of her routine. She’d drink the entire glass right there in front of the fridge. Then she’d walk into her room and stare at the TV for a little bit, listening to the weatherman deliver a forecast—more heat—she already knew.

Mom was beautiful but always on the edge of exhaustion. When she was in her twenties, she had worked briefly as a fashion model. Sometimes she’d let me look at pictures of her from those days, hair in box braids, her lithe frame draped in gowns her sister had designed, posing on runways. Even a long day of work couldn’t deny her the colors her black hair flashed, like raven feathers, when the light hit it just so. I was proud of her beauty, my first diva. Even as my body felt mangled by puberty, I took consolation in the fact that I came from a woman like her: a woman who read three newspapers every day, who could make everyone in a room light up with laughter, who would tuck notes into my lunch box daily, signing off, “I love you more than the air I breathe.”

After working at the airport all day, Mom was too tired for any of my questions, so I waited until she’d had a cigarette. After a smoke, she would be ready to talk.

She saw the Polaroid in my hand when I walked up to her. “I’d been wondering what happened to that.” She held the photo in her hand gently, as if it would crumble to dust if she wasn’t careful. Her face softened just a little.

“Who is he?” I asked.

She looked out the window at the oak tree right outside the living room. She stared at it long and hard, like she was waiting for some signal. Moments like this had taught me how to shut up and wait for an answer. When I was younger, I would give up during Mom’s pauses because I thought the answer wasn’t going to come. Eventually I learned that she was just testing me, to see how serious I was about finding out.

I stared at the window with her, then arched one eyebrow.

She sighed.

“A friend from school. We’d go on road trips together now and then. We went to Jackson once.”

She paused again, still looking at the tree. For a moment, it was quiet inside the apartment and out, like the heat was making the entire town hold its breath. Then Cody and Sam started yelling at each other in the parking lot.

Mom frowned and turned back to me.

“Not too long after that, he found out he was sick and... and he killed himself.”

She was already walking back to the kitchen for more water, which was her way of saying that the conversation was over. It was too hot, the day too long.

I wanted to see the man’s picture again. He had looked healthy to me. He was young, early twenties. And what did being sick have to do with killing yourself?

“Sick with what?” I called out, even as I felt bad for asking.

I had stepped into someone else’s house without their permission, but now that I was inside I couldn’t help looking around.

“AIDS,” she said.

She breezed into her bedroom and closed the door. I could hear her open a drawer and turn the TV on. I tried to listen for the weatherman’s predictions, but the volume was down too low.

I went back into my room and pulled Another Country out from under my pillow. After reading and rereading the same paragraph several times, I set the book back down.

AIDS, I thought. Shit.

She hadn’t even said her friend’s name.

“GAY” WASN’T A word I could imagine actually hearing my mom say out loud. If I pictured her moving her lips, “AIDS” came out instead. But in the days following our conversation about the photograph, I could feel the word “gay”—or maybe the word’s conspicuous absence—vibrating in the air between us.

I’d read in one of my nature books that there are some sounds that occur at a frequency only dogs and special radios can pick up on. Sounds that can only be heard if you were designed to hear them. I could hear that word ringing high above every conversation, every moment, because I thought about being gay all the time.

I heard it vibrating in the air when I watched Cody and his friends playing pickup in the park, sweat making their shirts transparent and heavy, their nipples poking at the fabric. I could hear it too when I thought about the man in the photograph. I wished I still had the Polaroid, but it would’ve been weird to ask Mom if I could look at it again. I wanted to see his smile; I thought I would understand it better now.

I carried that man’s smile in my head for three days until the smirk became a laugh, a taunt, a howl. One morning as Mom got ready to leave for work, I stared at the ceiling, then closed my eyes when she opened my bedroom door to let the dog in. Whenever she left, Kingsley would panic, pressing his face against the window so he could watch her car pull away. It happened five days a week; but each morning he was just as frantic, as if this would be the day she left, never to return.

With Kingsley yipping at my ankles, I ventured into Mom’s room. The picture wasn’t on her dresser and I thought about going through her drawers to find it. The last time I had done that, though, I’d found her vibrator. The discovery had been its own punishment.

Still, I knew that there was a place I could go to get the answers I wouldn’t find at home. Throwing on clothes without even eating, I opened the front door and locked it behind me. Kingsley barked and scratched at the sill as if he were trying to warn me.

IN THE PUBLIC library’s air-conditioned coolness, I decided I knew better than to ask the wrinkled woman at the circulation desk where to find books about being gay. Instead, I slowly walked up and down each aisle, scanning book spines until I found what I was looking for. The first book that stopped me was for parents dealing with gay children. The introduction was worded like it was intended for readers coping with a late-stage cancer diagnosis. I put the book back on the shelf, wrong side out.

Eventually, I gathered five or six books and sat down on the floor with them in my lap. Like any teenage boy trained at reading things he shouldn’t be, I looked both ways before opening any, then got up and grabbed a decoy off the shelf. It was a book about the “sociology of boys.” I kept it open on the second chapter and within reach in case someone I knew came down the aisle and I needed a quick alibi.

While I was reading a book about “defining homosexuality,” my dick started to get hard. The writing certainly wasn’t sexy; the language was outdated and dry. Still my body responded.

That changed as I read further into the books in my pile. All the books I found about being gay were also about AIDS. Gay men dying of AIDS like it was a logical sequence of events, a mathematical formula, or a life cycle. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly; gay boy, gay man, AIDS. It was certain. Mom’s friend got AIDS because he was gay. Because he was gay, he killed himself. Because he knew he was dying anyway.

I read about gay men who were abandoned by their families when they came out. Or worse, who didn’t tell anyone that they were gay, even when lesions started to blossom on their skin like awful flowers. Either way, the men in those books always seemed to die alone. I took some comfort in the fact that Mom knew about her friend’s illness. Maybe he had been able to tell the people close to him. Maybe Mom was the kind of person you could tell.

When I stood up to put the books back on the shelf, I realized my hands were shaking. I felt like I had made the mistake of asking a fortune-teller to look into my future, and now I was being punished for trying to look too far ahead. Walking outside, the blast of hot air was a relief.

I passed the park on the way home, and the usual boys were on the basketball court. Shirts and skins. I looked at their bodies, but only for a moment. I couldn’t really focus. In every man’s expression, shimmering amid the heat waves, I found myself searching for the face of the man in the photograph—for a hint of that smile, that beautiful, unforgivable smile.

Reading Group Guide

Stag's Leap

Poems

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By Sharon Olds

Knopf

Copyright © 2012 Sharon Olds
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780307959904

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The Last Hour

Suddenly, the last hour
before he took me to the airport, he stood up,
bumping the table, and took a step
toward me, and like a figure in an early
science fiction movie he leaned
forward and down, and opened an arm,
knocking my breast, and he tried to take some
hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,
and then we stood, around our core, his
hoarse cry of awe, at the center,
 at the end, of our life. Quickly, then,
the worst was over, I could comfort him,
holding his heart in place from the back
and smoothing it from the front, his own
life continuing, and what had
bound him, around his heart—and bound him
to me—now lying on and around us,
 sea-water, rust, light, shards,
the little eternal curls of eros
beaten out straight.


Stag’s Leap

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It’s so quiet,
and empty, when he’s left. I feel like a landscape,
a ground without a figure. Sauve
qui peut—let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns
hung where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old
vow have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.


My Son’s Father’s Smile

In my sleep, our son, as a child, said,
of his father, he smiled me—as if into
existence, into the family built around the
young lives which had come from the charged
bouquets, the dense oasis. That smile,
those years, well what can a body say, I have
been in the absolute present of a fragrant
ignorance. And to live in those rooms,
where one of his smiles might emerge, like something
almost from another place,
another time, another set
of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be
held in mysteriousness, and a little
in mourning. The thinness of his lips gave it
a simplicity, like a child’s drawing
of a smile—a footbridge, turned over on its back, or seen
under itself, in water—and the archer’s
bow gave it a curved unerring
symmetry, a shot to the heart. I look back on that un-
clouded face yet built of cloud,
and that waning crescent moon, that look
of deep, almost sad, contentment, and know myself
lucky, that I had out the whole
night of a half-life in that archaic
hammock, in a sky whose darkness is fading, that
first dream, from which I am now waking.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds Copyright © 2012 by Sharon Olds. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

★ 06/17/2019

Poet Jones (Prelude to Bruise) explores sexual identity, race, and the bond between a mother and child in a powerful memoir filled with devastating moments. As a gay African-American boy growing up in Texas, Jones struggled to find his way. In 1998, at age 12, “I thought about being gay all the time,” he writes, but at home the subject was taboo. Here, Jones candidly discusses his coming of age, his sexual history, and his struggle to love himself. He describes engaging in destructive behavior in college, including repeated relations with a sadistic, racist man, and their encounters graphically illustrate how sex and race can be used as weapons of hate. Jones writes that, at that grim time in his life, he appeared to others to be a happy young man: “Standing in front of the mirror, my reflection and I were like rival animals, just moments away from tearing each other limb from limb.” Jones beautifully records his painful emergence into adulthood and, along the way, he honors his mother, a single parent who struggled to support him financially, sometimes emotionally, but who loved him unconditionally until her death in 2011. Jones is a remarkable, unflinching storyteller, and his book is a rewarding page-turner. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES BY SAEED JONES

“[A] devastating memoir....Jones is fascinated by power (who has it, how and why we deploy it), but he seems equally interested in tenderness and frailty. We wound and save one another, we try our best, we leave too much unsaid....A moving, bracingly honest memoir that reads like fevered poetry.”—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"A raw and eloquent memoir. One could say that Saeed Jones' new memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, is a classic coming-of-age story....But Jones' voice and sensibility are so distinct that he turns one of the oldest of literary genres inside out and upside down. How We Fight for Our Lives is at once explicitly raunchy, mean, nuanced, loving and melancholy. It's sometimes hard to read and harder to put down." —MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR'S "FRESH AIR"

"Extremely 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.....Jones writes with the confidence of a veteran novelist and the flare of an accomplished poet. This is an important coming-of-age story that's also a collection of tiny but significant joys. More importantly, it's a narrative that cements Jones as a new literary star — and a book that will give many an injection of hope."—NPR

“Urgent, immediate, matter of fact....The prose in Saeed Jones’s memoir How We Fight for Our Lives shines with a poet’s desire to give intellections the force of sense impressions.”—THE NEW YORKER

"Jones’ explosive and poetic memoir traces his coming-of-age as a black, queer, and Southern man in vignettes that heartbreakingly and rigorously explore the beauty of love, the weight of trauma, and the power of resilience."—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"[Jones'] tenacious honesty compels us to be honest with ourselves. His experiences—negotiating grief, family dynamics, and a forthright identity—require our reckoning."—KIRKUS PRIZE 2019 CITATION

“[This] memoir marks the emergence of a major literary voice...written with masterful control of both style and material.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)

“Powerful...Jones is a remarkable, unflinching storyteller, and his book is a rewarding page-turner.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)

"An unforgettable memoir that pulls you in and doesn’t let go until the very last page."—LIBRARY JOURNAL (STARRED REVIEW)

"A luminous, clear-eyed excavation of how we learn to define ourselves, “How We Fight for Our Lives” is both a coming-of-age story and a rumination on love and loss....a radiant memoir that meditates on the many ways we belong to each other and the many ways we are released."—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"There are moments of devastating ugliness and moments of ecstatic joy...infused with an emotional energy that only authenticity can provide."—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

"Phenomenal....In this profound, concise memoir, the 33-year-old writer isolates key moments from his youth and sharpens their points for maximum effect. We follow a young, searching Jones through his early years with his loving single mother, along a path of unrequited lust, furtive sexual experiences, and disapproving relatives, through his hard-won self-acceptance and into the grief of losing the person closest to him."—INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

"Jones’ evocative prose has a layered effect, immersing readers in his state of mind, where gorgeous turns of phrase create some distance from his more painful memories. Although its length is short (just 189 pages), How We Fight For Our Lives fairly pulses with pain and potency; there is enough turmoil and poetry and determination in it to fill whole bookshelves."—THE AV CLUB

"How We Fight for Our Lives is a primer in how to keep kicking, in how to stay afloat...Thank god we get to be part of that world with Saeed Jones’ writing in it."—LAMBDA LITERARY

"Jones' unabashed honesty and gift for self-aware humor will resonate with readers, especially those in search of a story that resembles their own."
—BOOKLIST

“Scorching...a commentary not only on what it takes to become truly and wholly oneself, but on race and LGBTQ identity, power and vulnerability, and how relationships can make and break us along the way.”
—GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

“This memoir is a rhapsody in the truest sense of the word, fragments of epic poetry woven together so skillfully, so tenderly, so brutally, that you will find yourself aching in the way only masterful writing can make a person ache. How We Fight for Our Lives is that rare book that will show you what it means to be needful, to be strong, to be gloriously human and fighting for your life.”
—ROXANE GAY, author of Hunger

“This book. Oh my goodness. It is everything everyone needs right now—both love song and battle cry, brilliant as fuck and at times, heartbreaking as hell. Every single living half-grown and grownup body needs to read this book. I’m shook. I’m changed.”
—JACQUELINE WOODSON, author of Another Brooklyn

“There will be little left to say, and so much left to make after the world experiences Saeed Jones's How We Fight for Our Lives. This is that rare piece of literary art that teaches us how to read and write on every page. It's so black. So queer. So subtextual, and amazingly so sincere. Saeed changes everything we thought we knew about memoir writing, narrative structure, and heart meat. All three are obliterated. All three are tended to over and over again. All three will never ever be the same after this book. It's really that good.”
—KIESE LAYMON, author of Heavy

From the Publisher