As fiction my rating would be much lower, but as nonfiction it's like well this is someone's real life story that really happened to them, and it's not like he's a bad storyteller, but if it were fiction it wouldn't be very good. There's no paragraph separations which really would've helped the tone of the stories being told. It's also listed as LGBTQ, but the overwhelming majority of the story is his childhood. That's part of the queer experience too of course but as a Black queer person I would argue this story is more about the struggles of Black life coming out of the South. He even spends a chapter or two denying his queerness. Also, the book is a lot more about his mom as the title shows. But I'm just being nitpicky now.