The story itself is compelling, but I found that the structure and wider context was almost always missing. It’s very long to be so myopic and creates a stutter step effect. There are some moments that ground the story well and the specificity allows for the connection I was looking for; then it would shift away from those moments, moving across memories and time, assuming a lot of the reader. The story telling methods constant shifting made it much more difficult to read for me.

The parts that work the best for me were his parents’ relationship dynamics and the concrete details around his identity. But most of the narrative ends up being about particular events unfolding with some nebulous emotional associations as they unfold. If this were fiction, I would say this book has a major problem with telling instead of showing, basically. Memoirs don’t need that story telling method but it did feel like that same kind of disconnect. There is some context missing, as well as assumptions, as I mentioned earlier, that make events that should have a lot of gravitas basically feel just perfunctory.