How We Fight for Our Lives

How We Fight for Our Lives (2019) is a memoir by American poet, essayist, and cultural critic Saeed Jones. Centering mostly on Jones's coming-of-age years, the book is a meditation on what it means to be a gay man of color in twenty-first-century America. Yet, it is also universal in its larger themes, speaking to the experiences of so many who encounter rocky terrain on their paths to fully embracing who they are—even, and especially, when everywhere you turn, it seems as if the world is against you. How We Fight for Our Lives won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time, National Public Radio, and O, among others, all named it one of the best books of the year.

The book opens in 1988, when 12-year-old Saeed has a chance encounter that inadvertently opens a new world of possibility. Raised by a single working mother in a small Lewisville, Texas, apartment, Saeed has just finished sixth grade. In between alternately despising and fantasizing about two other boys in his building, he tries to read one of the books from his mother's bookshelf, James Baldwin's novel Another Country. Turning one of the pages, he finds a polaroid tucked there. He does not know the man in the picture, but something about it strikes him. The man seems to be looking straight through the photo—straight through time itself—and into Saeed's eyes. When his mother comes home from her job at the airport, Saeed asks her who the man is. She tells him that the man was an old friend of hers who died of AIDS, and then she leaves the room. Saeed intuits that the man in the photo was gay, but he imagines it's easier for his mother to say "AIDS" than it is for her to say "gay"—that's how foreign and forbidden the topic of homosexuality is in the Jones household. Intrigued, Saeed goes to the public library to research what gay actually means, but instead of books about identity and belonging and support, all the books concerning gay topics invariably concern AIDS as well. As he walks home from the library, taking note only briefly of the boys playing basketball in the local park, Saeed feels punished, as if he is trying too hard to look into his future, which only seems grim if all those books are true. Still, he thinks of the man in the polaroid and that intense, worlds-spanning smile.

This is the beginning of Saeed's journey to understand his sexual identity. Shortly after finding the polaroid, Saeed gets into a fight with the two boys in his apartment building. During the course of the scuffle, one of the boys calls Saeed a faggot. The word feels like an assault, more powerful than any of the blows exchanged. But, also, oddly, a relief, as if someone finally spoke the truth aloud. This, like the polaroid incident, is a watershed moment for young Saeed. It illustrates what becomes a more complex relationship with his sexual orientation, which he sees as a source of both condemnation and freedom.



These contradictory emotions intensify as Saeed grows up and graduates from high school. During the summers, he goes to stay with his maternal grandmother, an ultra-religious woman who ensures he receives a steady supply of church and the Bible. However, Saeed doesn't feel totally at ease in her presence, especially as he gets older, as it feels like she knows something about him that he doesn't fully know yet. And fueled by her faith, that something is something she most certainly does not like.

Complicated issues abound outside of his immediate home and family as well. With police brutality reaching unprecedented heights, Saeed sees on the news and in the streets the danger of being a man of color in America. His gayness only compounds the danger. "Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish," he writes.

And, so, he learns to fight for his life. He fights a system designed to keep single mothers like his from truly reaching their fullest potential. He fights to thrive in institutions where color can be a hindrance; he receives an acceptance to NYU, but because his mother can't afford it, he instead attends Western Kentucky University and then goes on to Rutgers. He fights to accept himself for who he is, wrestling with his desires, as well as the self-hatred he feels for allowing himself to be reduced to a fetish by his sexual partners. He fights to love himself enough to come out to his beloved mother, with whom he remains close, even though she struggles with his sexual orientation. He fights for the security to walk down the street, safe and unharmed. He fights to assert his humanity. He fights for his life, and, in sharing his story, he shows us how to fight for ours too.



Saeed's mother passes away from a heart ailment when he is still in his twenties. Wracked by grief, he goes on a trip to Spain. The book ends with Saeed taking a swim in the clear blue sea, and it is a sort of rebirth, a baptism of the soul. His mother's death teaches him that survival isn't always up to the individual. Other forces and factors come into play. And, for perhaps the first time, he begins to relinquish his grip ever so slightly, allowing himself to simply be.