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Biography & Autobiography.
Essays.
Nonfiction.
Humor (Nonfiction.)
HTML:NATIONAL BESTSELLER ? Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today ? From the creator of Elle??s ??Eric Reads the News,? a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way. ??Pop culture??obsessed, Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny . . . [R. Eric Thomas] is one of my favorite writers.???Lin-Manuel Miranda, Entertainment Weekly FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD ? NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TEEN VOGUE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine ? NPR ? Marie Claire ? Men??s Health R. Eric Thomas didn??t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went??whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city??he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an ??other? through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents?? house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what ??normal? means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story. Here for It will resonate deeply and joyfully with everyone who has ever felt pushed to the margins, struggled with self-acceptance, or wished to shine more brightl… (més)
I laughed out loud many times listening to this audiobook. I'm not sure if R. Eric Thomas would cringe at this comparison, but he was giving me Titus Andromedon vibes and I liked it. ( )
Here for It is a collection of essays by writer R. Eric Thomas. Most of them are about his struggle with finding his true identity. He’s Black but he went to an all-white private school. When around a lot of Black people, like at church, or later at college, he never felt like he was Black enough. He’s also gay but didn’t let himself acknowledge that for a long time. Even when having a relationship with a man in college, it was hard for him to accept that he was gay.
Being gay also put him in conflict with his Christianity. He grew up in a Black Baptist church where being gay was so taboo it wasn’t even talked about. There was no need because no one in the congregation would ever be gay.
Even though those sound like heavy topics, this book is mostly hilarious. I’ve actually read it twice. I rarely reread so that’s saying something. The first time I read it in print and it was funny. The next time, I listened to it on audiobook and it was next level. People at the gym probably thought I was a weirdo seeing me laughing to myself while on the treadmill. His voice and comedic timing are perfect.
DNF stopped at page 210 and skimmed the rest. I enjoyed the first 150 pages of the book but then it started slogging around the Kanye essay. I enjoyed the essays when he talked about his upbringing and his meaningful life experiences but jeeze the hair story that didnt go anywhere, the blanket story, kanye (r/im14andthisisdeep), the easter egg story, his cheese and wine friend, his Elle or internet stories (didnt know him prior and I dont read elle) were super uninteresting and frankly a waste of my time.
Also, these are one of those books where I see 5 star reviews and I call bs ( )
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it.
—MARY OLIVER, "DON'T HESITATE"
Dedicatòria
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
For my parents, Bob and Judi Thomas,
and their parents, Clara and Adelita and Walter and Columbus.
For everyone further on down the line and everyone yet to come.
Primeres paraules
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
For a number of years, I was under the impression that my birth was the result of an immaculate conception.
Citacions
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
I suddenly encountered—my blackness or my gayness or my Christianness or my Americanness and their intersections—would somehow get uncomplicated through the magic of time, like a movie montage. Spoiler alert: they did not.
Though I do have a constant hum of low-level anxiety about organizing my time, and producing a punchline, and keeping this gig, I still feel like I should be struggling more. Remember how Carrie Bradshaw got drunk at lunch every day and stayed out till four in the morning on dates, and wrote just one weekly column but was still on the side of a bus? I'm not on a bus and I write every day, but I couldn't help but wonder if I've put enough effort in to deserve this.
But after nearly four decades on this planet and a long, nightmarish conversation about "economic anxiety" and the "forgotten working class," I am willing to entertain the idea that there are many kinds of poverty, that your mortgage can be paid on time and your children can be fed and you can still live in Poor America.
In the present, my parents will drop details about how things used to be for them with a casualness that beliew how stunning those facts are. They shared a car for many years, so my father sometimes walked for miles to get home; he worked three jobs to afford school for me and my brothers, including a paper route in the wee small hours of the morning. My mother worked tirelessly to build a nurturing and educationally vigorous home for a decade and then went back to teaching elementary school, while putting herself through grad school and taking care of her ailing parents. And, for a ten-year stretch, they didn't buy themselves clothing.
At the public school, one of my classmates bit me on the hand in protest for having to share computer time with me, and my mother rolled up on that place like a flash flood to whisk me and my lightly bleeding hand out of there.
The world outside Bubbleland was unjust and frightening and sometimes violent, but inside was different. Inside, our futures were brimming with possibilities and our backs were straight and we had as many choices available to us as any of our contemporaries.
In Bubbleland, we were separated from forces that sought to harm us and given resources that could expand our worlds. This mobility is the best kind of intention to set for your child, I think. And not only that, it's what every child should have. It's what they deserve. And if the world were just, they could have it. And so, if you're my parents, you do everything in your ability to make that world appear, even if it is partly an illusion, even if the effort is breaking you. You do it, because perhaps if your child can live in this more just world for long enough, it will become their reality.
I know that my parents wanted me to live in a better world than they had, but they must have also desperately hoped I'd be prepared to live in the real world. Why else would they teach me to raise my voice against injustice, to write letters, to make hard choices?
Even though I had literally no qualifications other than "willing to play many games of Chutes and Ladders" and "can dial a phone," I became very popular in the babysitting scene.
The family I was babysitting for had one of those houses out of a Nancy Meyers film: the gleaming kitchen with a marble-top kitchen island next to a plush TV room and breakfast nook with three walls of windows; the doorbell that played a full concerto; the rooms that weren't decorated, but curated. I understand the allure of this kind of space. Everything was new in this place, even the things that weren't new. The antiques were polished to a shine; the books in the library were like set decorations from a box labeled "Intelligent, Wealthy Person." When I was growing up, my mother used to joke that our interior design style was "Deceased," meaning someone has died and left us their furniture, whether we wanted it or not. So the pristine order of a suburban house was like an alien spaceship to me: attractive but deeply foreign; potentially home to something sinister.
Their house was so big that I didn't even wander around it for fear of getting lost. They didn't have a pantry; they had a dry-goods room. I spent twenty minutes standing inside it, smelling spices. There were so many rooms on the ground floor, I worried that I would stumble into a secret passageway and never return.
She spoke about her feelings with a sort of strangeness; she was a mystery to herself then, like so much of the world. So much of what we thought about was still waiting to be filed away in its proper place: the vagaries of emotion, the substance of blackness, the weight of grief. What we didn't know was that for some things, there is no permanent place.
Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I've learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.
When I was a strange, uncomfortable boy, I met a melancholy, cerebral girl.
I'd observe the people going in with all the attention and all the nuance of Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor from Bewitched.
I stared at him like the lead character in A Beautiful Mind trying to figure out the hidden equation.
I had been good in all the ways you were supposed to be good.
Robert Eric Thomas is an intentionally racially neutral name, as my parents didn't want others to be able to see my name on a job application or résumé and discriminate against me. It was a beautiful and sort of heartbreaking gift.
The feeling of being alone, I've found, is the poison that has no taste.
Having worked through, or at least identified, some of my issues about my race, I was still unsure exactly what my blackness was. I never felt black enough, no matter who I was around, and this was exacerbated in moments when I felt overly gay. It felt like, despite the evidence provided by the charred frame of the Sportsman, blackness and gayness canceled each other out.
I carried the shock and the fear of that moment with me always in those times. It smoldered inside me, moving slowly but overtaking everything, like lava.
When you are on fire, people tend to look at you. This was the last thing that I wanted, so I slowly reached my arm up, still singing the damn Stevie Wonder "Happy Birthday," and started patting myself on the shoulder to put the flame out. Just a regular uncomfortable gay person standing against a wall, patting himself on the back. Self-care! Nothing to see here.
The idea was intriguing to me but only in the way that television is intriguing to a cat.
I took a breath, raised my bat, and concentrated. The ball came sailing toward me; I could tell it was a good pitch, right over the plate. I swung, hard. And missed. Hard. I swung so hard that my foot popped up like when they kiss in the movies and I did a little pirouette. I came to a stop dizzy and chagrined. The shortstop looked bored; the boys in the outfield were braiding each other's hair. The very nice lesbian approached me again. "Okay," she said. "That swing was a little gay. You need to butch it up."
I had that same discomfort around them that I felt at random parties or sometimes at work or sometimes just walking down the street. And I'd assumed that what I was intuiting was the truth about them—that I just wasn't man enough to be a part of their group. When, in reality, I was slowly realizing the truth about myself—that I had more work to do on my internalized homophobia.
One night, while I was living in Philly, a car burst through the wall of my childhood home like the Kool-Aid Man and landed, as fate would have it, on a pile of my high school yearbooks.
Throughout my early thirties, I loved to tell stories on first dates. I considered myself very good at first dates and I decided the stories were why. I didn't get a lot of second dates, though, so maybe I wasn't actually good at first dates. And maybe the stories were why. I'll have to take a poll. If you have dated me, please send a brief email just saying "Yes" or "No." I'll figure it out. Whatever the truth is, something was different with Jay, my first long-term boyfriend: we went out and then we went out again and, miracle of miracles, we kept going out. Apparently that's how these things happen. Who knew?
I was shocked by how easy it was to fall in love, after years of bad dates and lonely nights. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed being with him all the time. I was shocked by how perfect everything seemed.
The peach that reminds you, as juices run down your hand, that being alive is generally a good and pleasant thing and you should keep doing it.
Time moved like molasses in those days. The stretch between summers was an endless, dry expanse, birthdays and holidays were mirages that were perpetually out of reach, and every Sunday we spend an eternity at church.
Jesus was born of a virgin, attended a trade school to learn carpentry, quit his job to start a small faith-based nonprofit with some friends, did a couple of well-received TED Talks, and then was persecuted, crucified, and rose again.
So, the goal of this whole "Life" thing was eventually to get to heaven, where there were streets of gold and everyone got a mansion and we'd worship God forever? Was it mostly singing or was there also a very long sermon? Because, if we're being frank here, the latter seemed a little less than ideal.
In church, God is our father and Jesus is our brother. Who are our cousins? Does heaven have an eccentric aunt?
Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren't about the business of achieving justice in our time, in our world, for everyone, what are they doing?
If I don't know what I want, how will I know if I've got it or if it's lost forever?
Darreres paraules
Nota de desambiguació
Editor de l'editorial
Creadors de notes promocionals a la coberta
Llengua original
CDD/SMD canònics
LCC canònic
▾Referències
Referències a aquesta obra en fonts externes.
Wikipedia en anglès
Cap
▾Descripcions del llibre
Biography & Autobiography.
Essays.
Nonfiction.
Humor (Nonfiction.)
HTML:NATIONAL BESTSELLER ? Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today ? From the creator of Elle??s ??Eric Reads the News,? a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way. ??Pop culture??obsessed, Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny . . . [R. Eric Thomas] is one of my favorite writers.???Lin-Manuel Miranda, Entertainment Weekly FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD ? NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TEEN VOGUE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine ? NPR ? Marie Claire ? Men??s Health R. Eric Thomas didn??t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went??whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city??he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an ??other? through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents?? house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what ??normal? means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story. Here for It will resonate deeply and joyfully with everyone who has ever felt pushed to the margins, struggled with self-acceptance, or wished to shine more brightl
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