Making Rent in Bed-Stuy: A Memoir of Trying to Make It in New York City

by Brandon Harris

Overview

A young African American millennial filmmaker’s funny, sometimes painful, true-life coming-of-age story of trying to make it in New York City—a chronicle of poverty and wealth, creativity and commerce, struggle and insecurity, and the economic and cultural forces intertwined with "the serious, life-threatening process" of gentrification.

Making Rent in Bed-Stuy explores the history and sociocultural importance of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s largest historically black community, through the lens of a coming-of-age young American negro artist living at the dawn of an era in which urban class warfare is politely referred to as gentrification. Bookended by accounts of two different breakups, from a roommate and a lover, both who come from the white American elite, the book oscillates between chapters of urban bildungsroman and a historical examination of some of Bed-Stuy’s most salient aesthetic and political legacies.

Filled with personal stories and a vibrant cast of iconoclastic characters— friends and acquaintances such as Spike Lee; Lena Dunham; and Paul MacCleod, who made a living charging $5 for a tour of his extensive Elvis collection—Making Rent in Bed-Stuy poignantly captures what happens when youthful idealism clashes head-on with adult reality.

Melding in-depth reportage and personal narrative that investigates the disappointments and ironies of the Obama era, the book describes Brandon Harris’s radicalization, and the things he lost, and gained, along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062415646
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/06/2017
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,122,278
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Brandon Harris, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, has worked in the world of American independent film as a critic and programmer, producer and director, screenwriter and educator. His writings about cinema, politics, culture, and the intersections between them have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Guardian, VICE, Daily Beast, Variety, n+1, New Inquiry, Brooklyn Rail, In These Times, Hammer to Nail, and Filmmaker magazine, where he is a contributing editor.

Editorial Reviews

…a searing debut memoir…With its stinging truths and inventive language, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy stands as a monument to what is lost when New York's low-rent underdog outer borough becomes just another county of kings.

The New York Times Book Review - Daniel Brook

03/27/2017
In this fascinating mishmash of a memoir, filmmaker and critic Harris grapples with the contradictions of gentrified Brooklyn, tossing film reviews, history, journalism, and a healthy dose of bile into his lumpy mix. Harris, an upper-middle-class art-school student from Cincinnati, moved to New York City to pursue auteur ambitions and landed in predominantly African-American Bedford-Stuyvesant. Harris, who’s black, was struck by the gulf between gentrifiers and gentrified as well as his increasing unease over his own precarious foothold among the privileged. Harris’s bold attempt to connect Brooklyn gentrification to the national plight of the African-American underclass falls short, in large part because his primary contact with Bed-Stuy natives is buying nickel bags of marijuana. He never convincingly portrays other people in his life. But many other sections of this disjointed hybrid sparkle, and his lengthy vivisections of Spike Lee and Lena Dunham are particular highlights. The non–Bed-Stuy material features his best writing, but his inclusion of so much of it—most puzzlingly a Mississippi detour—further dissipates the central narrative. Despite the unevenness, this memoir provides hard-won insights into the divided loyalties of middle-class African-Americans, and a convincing description of a 21st-century New York City where only the rich can thrive. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A melancholic, lyrical new memoir… Harris’s memoir has a pleasing specificity.” — The New Yorker

“Making Rent in Bed-Stuy from Amistad should be required reading for every single young person living in a gentrifying neighborhood.” — Vogue

“A searing debut memoir…With its stinging truths and inventive language, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy stands as a monument to what is lost when New York’s low-rent underdog outer borough becomes just another county of kings.” — New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating… This memoir provides hard-won insights into the divided loyalties of middle-class African-Americans, and a convincing description of a 21st-century New York City where only the rich can thrive.” — Publishers Weekly

“A thought-provoking examination of the millennial black experience in the first decade of the 21st century.” — Kirkus Reviews

“[Harris’s] wide-ranging meditation on race and class, film and literature, black history and crime reportage carves out its own space in American letters.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

“Brandon Harris’s first book is a wide-ranging meditation on race, poverty, bohemia, and film history. It’s the introduction to American letters of a brilliant, funny, antic voice-and a rebuke, in a form newly discovered, to the people James Baldwin once called our ‘morally bankrupt and desperately dishonest countrymen.’” — Keith Gessen, a founding editor of n+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men

“There were passages that made me burst out laughing, paragraphs that made me want to scream, and pages that made me want to take Brandon by the collar and simply shake him to his senses. Clever and powerful. Everybody interested in discovering how Millennials are living will find Making Rent in Bed-Stuy fascinating.” — Julianne Malveaux, economist and author of Are We Better Off? Race, Obama, and Public Policy Julianne Malveaux, economist and author of Are We Better Off? Race, Obama, and Public Policy Julianne Malveaux, economist and author of Are We Better Off? Race, Obama, and Public Policy Julianne Malveaux, economist and author of Are We Better Off? Race, Obama, and Public Policy

From the Publisher

[Harris’s] wide-ranging meditation on race and class, film and literature, black history and crime reportage carves out its own space in American letters.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Brandon Harris’s first book is a wide-ranging meditation on race, poverty, bohemia, and film history. It’s the introduction to American letters of a brilliant, funny, antic voice-and a rebuke, in a form newly discovered, to the people James Baldwin once called our ‘morally bankrupt and desperately dishonest countrymen.’

Keith Gessen

A searing debut memoir…With its stinging truths and inventive language, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy stands as a monument to what is lost when New York’s low-rent underdog outer borough becomes just another county of kings.

New York Times Book Review

There were passages that made me burst out laughing, paragraphs that made me want to scream, and pages that made me want to take Brandon by the collar and simply shake him to his senses. Clever and powerful. Everybody interested in discovering how Millennials are living will find Making Rent in Bed-Stuy fascinating.

Julianne Malveaux

A melancholic, lyrical new memoir… Harris’s memoir has a pleasing specificity.

The New Yorker

Making Rent in Bed-Stuy from Amistad should be required reading for every single young person living in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Vogue

A melancholic, lyrical new memoir… Harris’s memoir has a pleasing specificity.

The New Yorker

2017-03-21
Race and identity loom large in Harris' highly personal and equally cerebral retrospective of his early days treading the streets of Brooklyn.Even today, "Clinton Hill," to many, sounds like a lot better place to live than "Bed-Stuy." So much so that when the author was pitched a place to live in New York City in the early 2000s, the latter was actually disguised and passed off as the former. Regardless, the brutal reality of adulthood and Bed-Stuy would soon be impressed on the conflicted Midwestern transplant hoping to make it as a filmmaker and critic in the city. In Bed-Stuy and its surrounding environs, Harris navigated the thorny landscape of racial relations and worked hard to make ends meet. In addition to his personal story, he also explores the struggles and similar experiences of local luminaries, including Jay-Z, who went from unknown drug dealer to international superstar and business mogul. In the example of Jay-Z, Harris sees his own struggles as a young black man trying to square with the American dream and dealing with the nation's systemic racism. President Barack Obama, who was trying to make it in Brooklyn during the mid-1980s, is also a source of serious contemplation about the ability and/or necessity of black Americans to code shift within certain sectors of society. The author's ambivalence is painfully demonstrated in strained relationships with his roommate and, later, his girlfriend, both white. As he writes about his roommate, "I would go weeks without talking to him, preferring solitude when I could find it in a loft in which you heard everything the other was doing regardless of the drywall." Traversing America's "double consciousness" is tough going, especially when you're just out of college and trying to earn enough for recreational marijuana and exorbitant Brooklyn rents. A thought-provoking examination of the millennial black experience in the first decade of the 21st century.

Kirkus Reviews