Well, with V.S.B., the majority of the pieces are reacting to things happening in the news. The book is much more personal, much more vulnerable. In the introduction, I have an entire paragraph about masturbation. There is also the thread of economic insecurity throughout my life. There are entire chapters about the levels of self-consciousness I possessed about my masculinity and my blackness, and how they impacted decisions that I have made. There is a chapter about how my wife and I got together. I think people who know me from V.S.B. and read this book might be anticipating a different sort of book.

How did you recall these specific references? Did you keep journals growing up?

I did not keep journals. My dad has been a reliable archivist. Or as reliable an archivist as a person can be. So many of the stories in the book, my dad tells like once a year — at family reunions, at picnics. So it’s not like I had to remember this thing that happened in 1985 . I was reminded of it in 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.

What were some of the challenges of writing this?

I didn’t want to encapsulate my existence as very traumatic and downtrodden, like “Great Expectations.” So much of the national dialogue about race deals with either terrible trauma or black excellence. I was more interested in the space in between, because that’s where I exist. So the challenge was finding a space between sensationalizing and also documenting and contextualizing.

In writing a memoir you are forced to reinterrogate beliefs and feelings that may have settled over decades, and you start to realize that maybe in this story where I was the victim I was actually the villain. Maybe this person who I considered to be so confident was actually performing just like I was. Maybe I didn’t treat that girlfriend as well as I thought I treated her.

You write a lot about how your relationships with women have evolved over the years, sometimes in less than flattering ways. How did you approach that topic?

I wrote a memoir. This wasn’t “Black Panther.” This wasn’t a superhero origin story. In order to write a compelling memoir, I had to tell the truth. And the truth is unflattering. The truth is embarrassing. But that truth is also human. So whenever I have those critiques about toxic masculinity, I am not absolving myself. I am not saying, you guys need to do better, it’s “we.” Even if I have had whatever incremental revolution necessary to make those statements, I have still been socialized. I don’t want to position myself as some sort of singular beacon of progress, because I’m not that at all. I am still definitely a work in progress. I just don’t want to hurt people.