Thomas really does accomplish the extraordinary…[He] has constructed a sort of alchemy on the page, but one born of experience, from skill and from a trust about what will end up on the other side…perhaps one of the biggest boons of Sink is its insistence that care is, above all, shared. It is everyone’s prerogative. In this way, Thomas has earned a deep bow.”—New York Times Book Review Washington Post Sink is loaded with arresting imagery and insights into the eerie space between claustrophobia and freedom unique to childhood.”—Vulture Philadelphia Inquirer Booklist Sink is a new kind of memoir, remixing the best parts of the genre. Though cohesive, the chapters in Sink are brilliant and brilliantly different. Thomas uses the act and politics of oration to move us within the silences of desire. It’s the way Thomas narrativizes encounters that make this book different than any memoir I’ve read, but also, so more propellant than any memoir in recent years. It is criminal and absolutely delicious that Sink is a literary debut. It is stunning in its audacious goodness." —Kiese Laymon, award-winning author of Heavy Sink is a singular memoir; all blood and nerve and near-unbearable beauty. A brilliant and fucking fearless debut.”—Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House Sink is a powerful, moving, and artful testament to the sustaining powers of the imagination. This compelling coming-of-age memoir is often brutal but also loving; it’s at turns critical, empathic, funny; it’s searching and revelatory the whole way through. Joey is a narrator for the ages, a boy whose unforgettable story dares expanding the possibilities of Black male identity."—Mitchell S. Jackson, award-winning author of Survival Math Sink recreates the state of childhood—its immense cruelty and immense promise. This book is for Joey, coming of age in northeast Philly in the late '90s: his video games and secret drawings, his longing, loneliness, and anger, his snakes and pet alligator and what happened, the roaches spilling out of the cereal box, the brutal trap of masculinity, the violence of family and smell of drugs through the door, every moment that lacked hope, every sweetness of imagination. Books like this remind us why we need books so much. With such tenderness, fury, and wisdom, Sink dreams a world beyond this one, shows us how to live there."—Hilary Plum, author of Hole Studies Sink is a visionary memoir.”—Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat "Sink is a book to read slowly and savor. With devastating, gorgeously-wrought candor, Joseph Earl Thomas plumbs the depths of his childhood to understand how his family's ideas of masculinity and loneliness shaped him. Through it all, Thomas insists on a buoyant resilience, reminding us that with a tender-hearted fierceness, it is possible to stay afloat." —Kat Chow, author of Seeing Ghosts Kirkus Publishers Weekly
Sink is loaded with arresting imagery and insights into the eerie space between claustrophobia and freedom unique to childhood.”
Joseph Earl Thomas’s Sink is a powerful, moving, and artful testament to the sustaining powers of the imagination. This compelling coming-of-age memoir is often brutal but also loving; it’s at turns critical, empathic, funny; it’s searching and revelatory the whole way through. Joey is a narrator for the ages, a boy whose unforgettable story dares expanding the possibilities of Black male identity.
award-winning author of Survival Math Mitchell S. Jackson
Joseph Earl Thomas has created a narrative that reads like a request and loving demand. Sink is a new kind of memoir, remixing the best parts of the genre. Though cohesive, the chapters in Sink are brilliant and brilliantly different. Thomas uses the act and politics of oration to move us within the silences of desire. It’s the way Thomas narrativizes encounters that make this book different than any memoir I’ve read, but also, so more propellant than any memoir in recent years. It is criminal and absolutely delicious that Sink is a literary debut. It is stunning in its audacious goodness.
award-winning author of Heavy Kiese Laymon
Sink is a singular memoir; all blood and nerve and near-unbearable beauty. A brilliant and fucking fearless debut.
award-winning author of In the Dream House Carmen Maria Machado
Joseph Earl Thomas has written an astonishing book. It’s his debut, but he’s already a master. Somehow Sink recreates the state of childhood—its immense cruelty and immense promise. This book is for Joey, coming of age in northeast Philly in the late '90s: his video games and secret drawings, his longing, loneliness, and anger, his snakes and pet alligator and what happened, the roaches spilling out of the cereal box, the brutal trap of masculinity, the violence of family and smell of drugs through the door, every moment that lacked hope, every sweetness of imagination. Books like this remind us why we need books so much. With such tenderness, fury, and wisdom, Sink dreams a world beyond this one, shows us how to live there.
author of Hole Studies Hilary Plum
I want this book for my younger self, to see the ideas and embodiments of Blackness and masculinity extended in these wonderful ways that allow space for nerdiness, nature, softness, and imagination with a rich interior life. This memoir has the power to keep shifting cultures and conversations into other worlds that are at first imagined, then made real. Sink is a visionary memoir.
author of Potted Meat Steven Dunn
12/01/2022
Thomas grew up in a northeast Philadelphia neighborhood with an extended family headed by his grandfather. Written primarily in the third person, this gripping memoir shows what it was like to come of age in a house filled with violence and neglect. The author's grandfather regularly terrorizes him with both physical and emotional abuse. His mother is addicted to crack and comes and goes, according to her addiction and occasional incarcerations. Their house is infested with cockroaches, which appear throughout the memoir in horrific frequency. Thomas is regularly bullied and abused by the children in his neighborhood and school but finds himself unable to fight back, except in his imagination. He finds solace and escape in video games and fantasies, eventually making friends who have the same interests. This book is a courageous and absorbing examination of one young man's life. This is a riveting memoir that will make readers squirm with its unflinching look at the unvarnished detail of the author's life and circumstances. VERDICT This is a compulsively readable and brave memoir.—Rebecca Mugridge
2022-09-29
"Of all the protagonists in this story—both real and imagined—just Joey, the boy, owned an Easy-Bake Oven." In his debut, Thomas announces his unusual approach to memoir in the first sentence: written in third person and including both real and imagined characters. Among the real ones are Popop, Joey's grandfather, and Ganny, who is "better than [Joey's] mother, Keisha, because at least she didn’t smoke crack or do it with men for money in front of the kids…even if he saw her as too much a cross between a punching bag and a robot.” In addition to the violence, chaos, and slovenliness of Joey's home in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia, there were the cockroaches—and they are everywhere, floating up in the cereal bowl, falling from the ceiling, crawling into his sleeping little sister's ear to bite through her eardrum. As for the imagined characters, the author writes about Goku, the monkey boy from Dragon Ball Z —"among the first people, or things, that Joey wished to be rather than deal with his own inadequate body"—and there were many more, as video games provided the only relief in Joey's life from the infinitely repeated lesson that "human survival dictated that a lot of people got hurt for other people to feel good and alive." At least with video games, he was the one doing the beating and killing, the one who got to feel good and alive. Maybe Thomas chose to write in third person as a way of buffering the misery and cruelty recounted here, but in a first-person narrative of a terrible childhood, the sheer persistence of the I can imply redemption.
It takes rare courage to tell a story this harsh and unredeemed. Thank God for video games.
