Book review: ‘Boy Erased’ moved me because it felt real

The 2 most recent LGBT books I’ve read are strikingly similar, but could hardly be any more different.

Call Me By Your Name tells the first-person story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality, and although it had me in floods of tears — which continued to return for weeks after closing the cover — it was at its heart a hopeful tale. It was a straight-up love story which explored feelings familiar to many of its audience.

Last night I struggled to contain my emotions after reading the acknowledgements at the end of Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased — the book that moved me in more ways than I thought 340 pages could. It too is the first-person story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality. It too fired my lacrimal glands into action. And in a weird way, it too is a story of hope. But it is also bursting with pain, with anger, with shame.

Conley tells the story of his teenage self, brought up as part of a strict baptist family within the USA’s deep-south Bible belt. The more he comes to term with his own sexuality, the more conflicted he feels about himself and his faith. That conflict is thrown outward violently when he is outed to his parents, who reject this part of him and pack him off to ‘conversion/cure’ therapy. This book describes both this experience, and the journey that led him to that point.

It’s a gripping read from the first line to the last.

If Call Me By Your Name struck a cord because it felt familiar, Boy Erased did the same because it’s so unfamiliar.

The big difference between the two is their respective sources. While Call Me By Your Name is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction I’ve encountered, Boy Erased is a sharp reality. The true story of Conley’s past. A heartfelt and honest memoir.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that, such is the wonder of his writing. I wanted to comment on its gripping construction, but that doesn’t feel like the right term. Instead, I’d say it was more expertly crafted. Like one of the cars his preacher dad would sell at his car dealership; every part doing a meaningful job itself, but together each complements the rest intricately, delicate details fusing to produce a 900-horsepower force.

The magic of Garrard’s story is that this force is produced from the whole, not its constituent parts. There are no explosions, no blazing rows, no dramatic cliffhangers. At no point does he exaggerate his memories for dramatic effect, as might have been so easy to do. I was waiting for that one euthoric moment or revenge, or that one devastating moment where his world comes crashing together in an instant. His contempt for those who ran his ‘ex-gay’ therapy programme is explicitly clear, but there is no stinging throw-down. Also clear is the difficult relationship with his father in particular — but instead of a damning assassination, he is painted almost apologetically, a fully-rounded human being; attempting to understand why he behaved as he did, rather than distribute blame. Indeed, he signs off the book with a special thank you to his parents“whose love has made all the difference.”

It simultaneously paints a vulnerability — how can he go through this and not show unadulterated anger?! — and strength — how did he find the strength to go through this and not show unadulterated anger?!

Conley describes some of the incredibly distressing experiences he was forced to endure, but even in the face of individuals who threatened to fatally damage him, he opts to explain and dictate rather than explode emotion over the page.

And such is the effect of his storytelling, it’s this lack of angry zing which makes it so haunting. It’s this quality which reminds me throughout that this is a memoir, the real events in a real person’s real life.

Its descriptive style picks me up and throws me head-first into every moment, the characters I feel like I know, and the situations I feel I am encountering, created so realistically in my mind. A chaotic narrative structure jumping back and forth, in and out of his ‘secret life’. Although he acknowledges from the start that some memories have been ‘reconstructed’, it’s clear that too many are as clear as they moment they happened. His mum tells of the water bubbles in the washing-up bowl that she recalls so vividly, such was the emotionally-charged energy streaming through the room. And it’s notable that I had to keep reminding myself that it was a memoir and not a story, because that’s how much of it reads.