We think we have so much insight until we realize how little we know about ourselves and other people.

If you don’t know that, you’re delusional or just about to lie a whole lot.

SJ:Writing a memoir is such a bizarre experience. NA: You’re so specific about tracing how your mom and grandma influenced you. I wanted to honor how I would have perceived them at the time but also make sure it was clear that they had a life and stories and fights beyond me, that they exist without me. A conservative black Christian grandmother. A black single mom raising a gay kid in the South-an image like that comes off like a smoke bomb. It was important to think about the stereotypes that await black women in American literature. I wanted to communicate that from the beginning, that sense of danger that I was fascinated by. My mom was such a compelling and mysterious figure. My mom was fighting for her life right alongside me.īeneath Amitav Ghosh’s Gentle Tone Smolders a Polemical FireĪs much as I’ve thought deeply about masculinity and internalized homophobia, we have to look outside and understand our relationships to the women in our lives. That’s why the title was really bothering me. My mom was already very much a part of the book, and even just as a writer, I was drawn to her on the page. And I wasn’t only thinking about how men fight for their lives. It just felt very arrogant and very self-absorbed, in a very masculine way, which is so ironic. And as I encountered different kinds of people, different kinds of masculinity, I could develop some insight about the bigger landscape.Īlso, the original title made me uncomfortable. I will never know what was going through that man’s mind-his life story, how he got to that room-but I could figure out how I got there. My intention was to focus on one personally apocalyptic New Year’s Eve in Phoenix-about self-destructive, internalized homophobia, why we’re drawn to men who don’t love themselves. It was based on an essay that I’d published in The Rumpus and that appears in the book.

Saeed Jones:Yes, it was definitely a shift in focus. Can you talk about that shift in title? Was it also a shift in focus? Originally, it was called How Men Fight for Their Lives. In this case, it’s about yours but also about the men around you-your neighbors, friends, lovers, uncles. Nawal Arjini: The book, like a lot of your poems, has a lot to do with American masculinity.

How we fight for our lives