WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER

A Memoir in Essays

By Damon Young

Damon Young has something to say about modern black life. The only question is: Which Damon Young is speaking? In his debut collection, a “memoir in essays,” Young fires an admirable volley into the robust field of memoirs by black American men. The book bridges his notable start as the co-founder and editor of the popular blog Very Smart Brothas and his most recent career as a cultural critic for mainstream publications. The shift in genre — from the snappy voice of blogging to the more erudite prose of the kind of long-form essays found in men’s magazines like GQ, where Young is a columnist — is uneven at times. Young may have moved on up from the corners of the internet, but his reflections on modern life lack a consistent, confident point of view. Is he speaking as his former or current self? When, precisely, does his voice shift from “around the way” boy to reflective man? These essays toggle between Young’s dueling narrative styles, and in the end the reader cannot be certain which is the definitive one.

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Still, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker” is a worthwhile read, especially given the current popularity of the black male memoir. His most notable contribution to that field is a voice steeped not in “black cool” but in what one might call black male emo. Young has emotions, and he may have more than a touch of social anxiety. He is nervous and angst-ridden and smart enough to label his feelings. His description of the “day-to-day abstract humiliation” of not having a driver’s license until he was 26 is a painfully honest account of the toll that ennui takes on black social mobility. The strongest essays are those in which he embraces that voice — the uncertain one that uses humor to interact with a world that expects him to be far more self-assured than he feels. When writing in that register, Young shines with often sad commentary. His memory of the time he and his father discovered that a 15-year-old neighbor boy was working as a prostitute, dressed like a woman, packs an emotional wallop with a begrudging laugh. The vignette appears in a particularly moving story about how and why Young, raised in a black Pittsburgh conversational tradition known as the “dozens” (“also commonly known as roasting”), is so very bad at it when it matters most. That essay joins meditations on compulsive heterosexuality as among the most poignant in this collection.

[ Read more about Damon Young in our recent profile. ]

Like many young men who have publicly come of age during the black feminist theory era of popular culture, Young knows the right things to say. He knows that sex work can be predatory and that rape is violence and that heteronormativity is oppressive. Whether Young has figured out how to actually live these beliefs remains elusive.