In “Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang,” U-God, born Lamont Hawkins, has found the right language and perspective with which to come to terms with his past. David Corio

Most fans of the Wu-Tang Clan have a favorite member. You can make a strong case for at least two-thirds of the nonet: GZA has the old-fashioned flow and the foreboding intellect; Method Man oozes cunning and charisma; the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard was pure funk, like the human embodiment of a James Brown grunt; RZA conceptualized the group’s entire sound and ethos; and Ghostface Killah and Raekwon crafted their own, colorfully absurdist, tag-team spin on traditional crime-talk; a credible argument could even be made for the spry and menacing Inspectah Deck.

The rapper U-God, though, who was born Lamont Hawkins, is an acquired taste: gruff, workmanlike, more of a bully than a poet. He’s not the overlooked member of the group—that would be the inscrutable and underrated Masta Killa. Rather, he is actively dismissed. Even his nickname, “the four-bar killer,” speaks to his scant role in one of hip-hop’s most acclaimed ensembles. (In 2016, Hawkins launched a lawsuit against the group for unpaid royalties.) But it’s precisely the strangeness, and even fragility, of Hawkins’s proximity to the group that makes his memoir, “Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang,” unexpectedly moving.

Hawkins, who was born in 1970, spent his earliest years in Brooklyn before moving to Staten Island, where he would meet his future Wu-Tang compatriots. He was the only child of a hopeful and hard-working mother, who moved to Staten Island, then in the throes of “urban renewal,” because she was drawn to the idea of raising her son in an aspirational, working-class community. Hawkins never knew his father—eventually, he would learn that his mother had become pregnant with him after she was raped. One of his earliest memories, Hawkins writes, is of hearing Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” playing on a radio when he was five years old; he followed the music outside, where he saw a woman standing on the roof of a neighboring building, threatening to jump. “I remember staring up at her till my neck was stiff,” he writes. “The sound of her hitting the concrete steps would resonate with me forever.” It was the first of many times that he would see death up close. Nonchalance, even in the face of such horror, would become a hallmark of Hawkins’s style. Elsewhere in the book, he recalls seeing his uncle bashing someone over the head with a brick; another time, a heroin-addicted babysitter nods off in the corner. Later on, in his teens, when he was still contemplating a more traditional career path, he studied to become an embalmer, since “certain things that’ll quease a motherfucker out just don’t bother me.”

Staten Island was not immune to the drug trade and its attendant turf wars, and, for the young Hawkins, the intimacy of the place made it impossible to run away from his problems. On Staten Island, he explains, you had to stand your ground and “make your claim,” whereas, in the teeming streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan, you “could pop someone and disappear like a fart in the wind.” Hawkins was still young when he met Method Man—who would become his most loyal and compassionate friend in the music business—and other future members of the Wu-Tang Clan; in middle school, he began hanging out with RZA, whom he saw as a bit of a nerd. (“To me nerds are cool,” he writes. “Nerds are non-threatening.”) In Hawkins’s telling, the group emerged slowly and organically, as friends, cousins, and friends-of-friends began rapping and dreaming together. They all became devoted to the Five-Percent Nation, a movement for historical, spiritual, and almost mystical self-determination, which splintered off from the Nation of Islam. The friends were united, too, by their love of martial-arts films—in the mythology they crafted for themselves, Staten Island became “the slums of Shaolin.”

Hawkins dealt drugs throughout his late teens; his polite and unassuming air served him well with the local cops, he writes. “They knew I was jingling—just not the level I was jingling on.” Then, in 1992, a careless confrontation with a rival dealer landed him in prison, just as the Wu-Tang Clan was working on its début album, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” which was released the following year. Hawkins got out in time to contribute a few verses, but he lacked sharpness and focus. “The first time I grabbed the mic at a show after coming home, I got booed,” he remembers. “I wasn’t really ready. I had the heart to try, though.” He quickly accepted his role as the versatile, hard-working utility player that every championship team needs. He also repeatedly violated his parole and ended up back behind bars during key moments of the Clan’s initial rise. He kept working on his rhyme skills, appearing on solo albums by other members of the Wu, and waiting for the time it would be his turn. Behind the scenes, he dealt with tantrums and mediated other people’s beefs, and he did all the radio promotions and random magazine interviews that nobody else wanted to do. (One of these interviews was with me, for a skateboarding magazine that no longer exists.)

When the Wu-Tang Clan was ready to record its sophomore album, 1997’s “Wu-Tang Forever,” the group rented a home in the Hollywood Hills. Fun was had, and events occasionally turned raucous. Hawkins recounts a potential encounter with a teen-age Kim Kardashian that was spoiled by Inspectah Deck (“He had no game”), and the time he almost punched out a smug Leonardo DiCaprio. But he mostly kept things mellow. One of my favorite moments from the bygone TV series “MTV Cribs” (lately revived on Snapchat) was filmed during this period: in a tour of Hawkins’s modest quarters—he got stuck with the smallest room in the Wu-Tang house—he showed off his collection of colorful, oversized “blowy shirts” and autographs, seeming very happy to be there. “Almost every morning on the patio before going into the studio,” he recalls in “Raw,” “I would remind myself to really be present and be in the moment so I can really appreciate everything.”

Hawkins was still coping, at the time, with a horrific incident that had happened back home. While the Wu-Tang Clan was on tour, someone he knew used his son, who was just two years old, as a human shield during a shoot-out. Miraculously, the child survived, though he suffered permanent damage to his kidneys and hands. Hawkins says that, other than Method Man, the members of the group weren’t particularly supportive. “They rubbed their fame and their wealth in my face even more,” he writes. Years before therapy seemed a viable option, he poured his emotions into one of the best tracks on “Wu-Tang Forever,” “A Better Tomorrow.” “The strong must feed, someone die, someone bleed,” he raps on the track. “One flew astray, and it caught my little seed.”

Hawkins’s career has never reached the same heights as the rest of the Clan’s—a reflection of his relative level of talent, mostly, but also of circumstances of timing and personality. In “Raw,” he displays an unusual degree of self-awareness about this fact. He describes how difficult it can be to maintain his craft and his confidence, a rare sort of candor in an art form typically premised on effortless cool. But the memoir’s most endearing moments involve the small victories that come with surviving into middle age and the momentary plateaus where Hawkins feels satisfied: the time in 1994, for instance, that he got to experience the novelty, for a black man from Staten Island, of “wearing a silk robe and tasting sake” in Japan.

“Raw” feels cathartic, as Hawkins finds the language and perspective to reckon with his past. His moment in the spotlight may be over, but he now has something that few of his Wu-Tang brothers, still so admired by a younger generation, have: the distance to tell his own story. He has often been forgotten, and has sometimes been ridiculed, but he was part of one of the great hip-hop groups of all-time—perhaps the only member who is more man than myth.