I liked this book a lot until the very end. It begins with a prologue in which Blow, in college, is driving with a gun to his mother’s house with the intention of killing his cousin, who molested him as a child. The prologue ends before he gets there. The rest of the book tells the story of his life from childhood up until that moment, ending with some reflections on his moral and existential crisis in that moment and how his identity and relationship with his bisexuality have evolved since then.
__Spoilers Below__
Blow decides in a split second not to kill his cousin, to take the exit off the highway and go back to college instead. In that moment, he realizes he can’t allow his trauma to affect his life so completely— he is an adult, and he needs to exert adult control over his emotions and not throw away his future with a murder charge.
However, the way the narrative of his decision on the highway flows into more general reflections on Blow’s subsequent emotional growth makes it sound like he had all of those revelations immediately. We don’t get to see the journey from that first moment of self-realization to where he is now— it’s all stuffed into a meditative summary that goes much, much faster than the rest of the book, which takes its time in tracing significant moments in his life. He stops showing and starts telling.
His actual words are very clear that his journey was not over in that moment and he still had decades of figuring stuff out and healing from his traumatic past left to go. However, the way the book is structured makes the arc become, to oversimplify, “Once I decided to get over my molestation, then I was happy and suddenly ok with being attracted to men.” Which is explicitly not the case, but rushing the rest of that development into only a handful of pages after two hundred-ish about how the trauma shaped his life still implicitly carries that message. This book falls into the kind of arc that other memoirs I’ve read, like those by Jacob Tobia and Juliet Jacques, actively tried to resist. The “being lgbtq is terrible, and you will be miserable, until you decide to get over it” implication is dangerous, even though I don’t think that message is his intention, and even though in this case it’s embedded in a relatively unrepresented story of a bisexual man, and a bisexual Black man at that. The only other bi man memoirs I can think of off the top of my head are white celebrity memoirs, of John Barrowman and Alan Cumming.