Book of the week

Utterly powerful, Boy Erased is a cry for tolerance and unconditional love of our kids. It should be required read.

Boy Erased by Garrard Conley (William Collins) $28 Our children do not belong to us,’’ writes author and trans advocate Janet Mock, ‘‘they are their own people’’. How true.

Mock’s accuracy is palpable in US author Garrard Conley’s haunting new memoir, Boy Erased, a story about a gay son of fundamentalist parents who, in struggling to accept himself, becomes convinced he can be ‘‘cured’’ by immersion in the ExGay Movement.

It’s a startling reminder of the power of hatred for ‘‘the other’’, the non-heteronormative, nonprivileged multitude.

Conley narrates his far-fromsimple life story simply.

His prose lacks adornment, the easy sentence structures, the restricted use of clauses: all of this makes Boy Erased seem not just much more factual, but also much more emotionally sincere. Additionally this straightforward style of confession packs a punch to the shocking moments in the story, of which there are many. The ethical and curative contradictions and falsehoods advocated by the Ex-Gay Movement, its leaders and

unquestioning acolytes, are laid bare. Ditto the sinister, criminal role played by ‘‘David’’ in outing Conley to parents, friends and community, and, conversely, the sexual diversity of those who, along with the author, subscribe to being healed.

Ultimately, through Conley’s unembellished approach, the sacrifice and parental struggle, the self-loathing and shame, the suicides and philosophical insolvency of this sad story remain with readers. If the narrative style of Boy Erased is cleverly artless, structurally, it’s a far more complex thing.

The author juggles multiple

timelines in the present, the recent past of being a student undertaking the Ex-Gay programme’s unforgiving strictures and the distant past of Conley’s sexual awakening.

Layering events from this chronological triptych aside one another paces the story well. More importantly, it steadily builds the various thematic strands of the book into an intense climax.

This then becomes more than a book about sexuality, or indeed, about being gay. It grows into an opus of family, social and sexual inclusion and acceptance and the perils of phobic thinking of all kinds, those which are emphasised in the book’s subtitle: a memoir of identity, faith and family.

Of these, it’s family which is the fulcrum around which the book rotates, as snippets of not only Conley’s journey, but also his mother and father’s navigations through various traumatic experiences, are stratified into denouements in which all of them are asked – and have to answer – questions of personal allegiance and belief, inevitably posed in the proposition that being gay is a societal and spiritual abhorrence.

Utterly powerful, Boy Erased isa cry for tolerance and unconditional love of our kids. It should be required read. – Siobhan Harvey