Mean Boys: A Personal History

Geoffrey Mak. Bloomsbury, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-6355-7794-5

Spike magazine editor Mak debuts with an intellectually rigorous memoir-inessays that pairs reflections on his difficult sexual coming-of-age with sharp musings on the digital era. Growing up gay and Asian in Southern California during the 1990s and 2000s, Mak struggled to fit in. He came out to his family at 29, and was rejected by his evangelical parents, who refused to accept that he wasn’t straight. Struggling with feelings of inferiority, Mak moved to Berlin and threw himself into the city’s druggy, sex-driven club culture. For years, he prayed at the altar of cool, aspiring to be part of something akin to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Instead, he found self-loathing and addiction, and eventually returned home to treat “unspecified psychosis.” In “My Father, the Minister,” Mak recounts his father’s eventual contrition for rejecting his homosexuality, and compares cruising bars to church, with “gods in all those saunas and sex clubs who had fallen short of the glory.” In the title essay, he analyzes Norwegian bomber and mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto and finds uncomfortable parallels to his own personal insecurity and desire to align himself with whiteness. Throughout, Mak delves into the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, online fashion magazines, and myriad other corners of internet culture to illustrate the contemporary obsessions with status and belonging that have long plagued him. By turns heartbreaking, enlightening, and frenzied, this burrows deep in the reader’s psyche and doesn’t let go. Agent: Noah Ballard, Verve Talent & Literary. (Apr.)