A frank depiction of loss and liberation
Garrard Conley grew up in BibleBelt Arkansas, the only child of devout missionary Baptists. For his Billy Graham-loving father, who ran a weekly Bible-study group at his car dealership, every earthquake was confirmation of the Rapture’s immanence. Conley himself often suffered scripture-induced nightmares, so when, in his teens, he started to experience same-sex attractions, he diligently worked to suppress them.
In his first year of university, Conley was raped, then outed by, another student, an experience that confirmed his already profound feelings of guilt and sinfulness. When his parents enrolled him in residential “exgay therapy” with the group Love in Action (LIA), he went willingly.
Now a writer and literature professor living in Bulgaria, Conley details this tumultuous period in his thoughtful, well-written and unsensational memoir, Boy Erased. With its 12-steps emphasis on cutting ties to “harmful” people, LIA comes off like a mix of AA and Scientology. “Patients” were asked to make family trees showing alcoholism, gambling and pornography.
Boy Erased isn’t a smug tale of liberal awakening: Conley is frank about the sense of loss that has come with denying his religion and, as a consequence, the family he still loves (if there’s a hero here it’s Conley’s mother, who unironically embodies the concept of “love in action”).
The story’s chronology is one of its astounding aspects. Conley attended LIA (many of whose leaders have publicly apologized) in 2004, and it’s pleasingly hard to fathom the seismic legislative and attitudinal shifts that have taken place since.
Secular literature devotees will thrill to Conley’s account of how novels helped free him intellectually and sexually. Indeed, his own writerly eye often wanders outside non-fiction’s constraints. Writing stories is the work he wants to do; this book is clearly the work he needed to do. Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries