Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays by Fenton Johnson (review)

In my experience, people raised in deeply religious households typically take one of a few paths: we embrace our inherited religion wholeheartedly; we reject that religion and, frequently, all religions; or we reject religion, yet still feel some spiritual hole that we’re not quite sure how to fill.

I have long placed myself in this third category. As a young Christian woman, I was taught that my body was dangerous and dirty, and that sex was permissible only in the context of opposite-sex marriage and preferably for the purposes of reproduction. My inability to reconcile that doctrine with my desire to have sex with my boyfriend led me away from the church, yet I could never quite shake a sense that, regardless of my position on the matter, I was a part of something bigger. Once, I even told an atheist boyfriend that I thought I’d probably be one of those people who came back to Christianity later in life; unsurprisingly to anyone but me, we broke up shortly thereafter.

In her article “A Skeptical Spirituality,” the philosopher Nell Noddings described this feeling of a holy hole as a “metaphysical longing.” She wrote, “When I observe the sun rising out of the sea or listen to the breakers in the dead of the night, I want to say ‘thank you,’ but to whom or what does one say it?”

I haven’t yet figured out how I want to answer Noddings’ question, but after reading Fenton Johnson’s latest book, Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays, I feel closer to being able to do so.

The book collects twenty-six essays, most of which were published in outlets like the New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Several later essays published in literary magazines and books and a handful of previously unpublished contemporary pieces round out the collection, which is arranged into four parts book-ended by a prologue and epilogue. The parts roughly correspond to four themes: place, gay culture and the AIDS epidemic, religion and politics, and the role of art/storytelling.

The essays are remarkably cohesive despite their collective span of more than twenty-five years, in large part because of Johnson’s voice, which is that of a sage elder, a mystic who easily traverses and knits the secular and the spiritual. For example, his 1996 essay “Basketball Days,” originally broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered, muses on the game’s graceful sensuality—“The droopy-drawer uniforms look designed to uglify the game’s erotic choreography, but the guys are so much hunkier now that they make up for the sagging shorts”—and then deftly slides into philosophy: “Only the young can defy gravity; with time we’re all pulled down and back to the earth’s embrace.”

Johnson, a faculty member in the University of Arizona’s creative writing program and the author of five memoirs and novels, has a knack for wrangling satisfying bits of universal wisdom into words, and receptive readers (or, to follow Noddings’s lead, why not call us skeptical spirituals) will find many such words to live by in these pages. From a 1992 essay on talking to his young nephews about safe sex: “I needed truth, which, I was discovering, was not to be accomplished in any single gesture but had to be lived out day by day, act by act.” From a 2009 essay on San Francisco: “We style it the City…but in fact it is only another of the infinite names of God, a word I use to name this present moment, this here and now.” From a 2016 essay on shrines: “Sometimes I think the mysterious force we call gravity is just another name for love, the force that pulls us down and back to the dust from which we came.”

As a writer, I envy Johnson’s easy authority on these heady topics, and as a reader, I generally find his evaluations to be well earned. I...