behold my midlife crisis

This short memoir follows Jones' early life growing up as a gay Black kid in 1990s Texas, through his college years and young adulthood struggling with feelings of unbelonging and uncertain identity.

The core of the book is his relationship with his mother, who died of heart disease when he was 26. She was an iconoclast, breaking with her family's conservative Christianity to become a Buddhist, and insisted on doing things her own way, including raising her son on her own. The dynamic between them is complex; he loves and respects her, and in many ways they're close and protective of each other, yet he doesn't feel truly seen by her. His sexuality is part of the barrier—she doesn't reject him, but is resistant to talking about it—and I also got a sense of her as a person who held others at arm's length because intimacy scared her.

But Jones is not too afraid to write about his most vulnerable, self-destructive, and howlingly painful moments. ( cut for content: gay bashing ) It doesn't read like he's being too harsh on himself, and it doesn't read like he's trying to make himself look good. It reads like he's found a narrative arc in what really happened rather than editing events into artificial tidiness.

Jones is primarily a poet, and the book's emotional clarity and concise lyricism bears that out. The material is heavy, but I didn't find it depressing. Rather, I felt that the fact that he's now able to write so honestly about what he's been through demonstrates that he's achieved what he's been longing for: knowing and sharing who he really is. He doesn't need to spell out that this happened for him, because when you read the book you're holding the evidence of it in your hands.