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  • Killing Ourselves SoftlyComplicity in Modern America
  • Maurice Carlos Ruffin
I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyoncé Michael Arceneaux 2018 Atria, 256 p. $17 PB.
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements Charlene A. Carruthers 2018 Beacon, 192 p. $22.95 HB.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Graham Caveney 2018 Simon & Schuster, 272 p. $26 HB.

At a writing conference several years ago, I had gone straight from the airport to a reception held by an organization that had given me a prize the previous year. The event was in the side room of a restaurant and there was cake. I love cake, so I grabbed one of the slices that everyone seemed to be enjoying so much. I was perhaps two bites in when a man approached me as if he knew me. The writing world is a small one, and it is possible to run into someone you met briefly at an earlier conference but who failed to make an impression. This was not the case. I knew I didn't know him, and he didn't ask any questions. He did, however, make a statement, which I'll paraphrase: I'm sorry. You can finish that, but then you'll have to leave because this is a private event.

There are moments when so many questions pile onto us that we lose our ability to speak or act. This was one such moment for me. If I could have spoken, I would have asked this man who he was. Did he work for the venue or the organization? Why did he think I didn't belong? What gave him the right to question my presence? If I could have acted, I would have given him a pie in the face. Well, a cake in the face.

I wasn't kicked out that night, but I didn't stay long. Whatever anticipation I felt at getting to meet people who thought highly of my writing had dissipated. As I rode in the back of a cab, speculating about all the events and people I might encounter over the next few days of the conference, I had one thought: I deserved what just happened to me. It was not a logical thought, that mixture of shame, self-loathing, and anger, but it also was not a new one. In fact, I have experienced enough similar incidents in the interim that I must have stuffed the cake insult into the junk drawer of memory. A friend recently reminded me of it, and it came to mind again when I read the following: "Our emotional responses conflict more than we think about more things than we think and books can help us to hold these conflicts in some kind of balance."

That line appears in Graham Caveney's new memoir, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness, a book that masterfully weaves together the author's many complex responses to trauma. Unfortunately, the true story of an altar boy who was molested by a priest the Church subsequently protected is not a new story. Yet Caveney does not exploit the salacious details of his experience. To the contrary, he relays his story with the control of someone who has thought deeply about his pain but maintains enough distance to make the telling palatable rather than melodramatic.

Indeed, it feels strange to discuss the pleasure of reading a memoir with such a dark betrayal at its core. But it's clear that Caveney himself takes pleasure—even catharsis—in the act of reconstructing the ordinary details of his life as a boy in an unremarkable, working-class English town. [End Page 164]

Early in the telling, he describes the entrées, side dishes, and condiments of a Tuesday-night meal in his house, a meal swamped in Daddies Brown Sauce, which "glugs from the bottle, smothering the dense gray blandness of the stew… No little light supper this: this is food that can still remember the workhouse." Caveney's hardworking, underpaid parents seem like the parents in Cheap Trick's "Surrender." Only it's hard to...

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