How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir - Ebook written by Saeed Jones. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir. NEW YORK (AP) — The publisher of memoir by a Louisville police officer who fired at Breonna Taylor after being shot during the deadly raid on Taylor’s apartment says it will release the book. Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Saeed Adyani / Netflix. 'Marvel's Jessica Jones' is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 'Orange Is the New Black' is based on a memoir by Piper Kerman.
Authors who turn themselves inside out for their stories, who are the most vulnerable and giving in their writing, often matter to us the most. In Saeed Jones’ memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, he relates his experiences growing up black and gay in the American South, offering a level of vulnerability that, one might assume, is a signifier that his heart is meant to be shared.
How does such a vulnerable writer enter into the public space of a book event? Jones shares a look into his book tour, which includes a visit to Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books.
Your book discusses the difficulty you’ve had being vulnerable with others throughout your life. What’s the difference between being vulnerable with people in real life and being vulnerable on the page?
Something you see in the book is my tendency to self-bully. It started when I was a gay black kid growing up in the suburbs. I wasn’t bullied by individuals; kids weren’t shoving me into lockers or calling me slurs to my face. Shame—electrified by racism and homophobia—was enforced by the broader culture though, and in response, I started bullying myself. I started saying cruel things about myself to myself. While I’ve generally grown out of self-hate, an ease with being tough and candid about myself to myself is an integral aspect of my writing. People often tell me that I’m so “brave,” but I don’t know how else to be.
It’s easy for me to be incredibly vulnerable on the page, because the blank page is just an iteration of my ongoing internal discourse. In real life though, while I’m all about telling the truth, I struggle with the cost of vulnerability. If I’m upset about something, I’ll confide in my best friend, Isaac, and often say something like, “I’m going to tell you about something that’s upsetting me, but please don’t hug me because I will lose it.” It upsets me when I realize that my vulnerability has made someone I care about emotional. Anyway, I’m sure this book tour will be super chill.
You visited Nashville last year with Isaac Fitzgerald. Was there anything you didn’t get to see or experience then that you’re looking forward to this time?
Oh, goodness. We had such a great time. Hell, we had breakfast with Ann Patchett! How do you top that? I am excited about all of the food. As someone raised in Texas and Tennessee, Southern food is one of my great joys.
If you could sit in the audience for an event with any author, living or dead, who would you like to see read from and discuss their book?
People keep asking me different iterations of this question, and my answer is always the same: I’d want to go to an after-party with James Baldwin. We’ve got archival footage; in the end, a reading is a reading. Why listen to James Baldwin read, when you can dance with him?
Has a reader ever asked a question or made a comment at an event that made you see your work in a new light?
After doing an event for the memoir recently, a woman said that she was so deeply moved by hearing me talk about grief and losing my mother that she “just wanted to adopt me.” I arched my eyebrows in surprise, and she repeated herself. I smiled the nervous-polite smile that I summon in these kinds of moments, thanked her and walked away. That moment helped me understand that, in opening myself up to readers, they’re going to open themselves up, too, and often, that’s messy. Sometimes they’re going to try to comfort me in awkward ways, and I have to be prepared for that. I know she meant well, but also, folks: I had a mother; her name was Carol Sweet-Jones. She was wonderful. I am not looking for replacements.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How We Fight for Our Lives.
Author photo by Jon Premosch
NEW YORK (AP) — The publisher of memoir by a Louisville police officer who fired at Breonna Taylor after being shot during the deadly raid on Taylor’s apartment says it will release the book even though its distributor, Simon & Schuster, announced it would “not be involved.”
Post Hill Press, based outside of Nashville, Tennessee, has scheduled a fall release for Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly’s “The Fight For Truth: The Inside Story Behind the Breonna Taylor Tragedy.”
“Post Hill Press continues to move forward with plans to publish Sgt. Mattingly’s book,” according to a statement provided Friday to The Associated Press. “His story is important and it deserves to be heard by the public at large. We feel strongly that an open dialogue is essential to shining a light on the challenging issues our country is facing.”
A Post Hill Press spokesperson declined comment on whether the publisher would seek a new distributor or distribute the book itself, a far more challenging undertaking without the resources of Simon & Schuster, one of the world’s biggest book publishers.
Reports of the book deal Thursday were met with widespread anger on social media, with Simon & Schuster authors Jennifer Weiner and Saeed Jones among those condemning it. Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter that “People love to profit off of Black pain and tragedy. It sells.”
Mattingly and another officer fired shots that hit Taylor during the March 13, 2020, narcotics raid. Mattingly was shot in the leg by Taylor’s boyfriend. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black emergency medical worker, died at the scene, but no drugs were found in the apartment.
The 48-year-old Mattingly was shot in the leg by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who said he fired a single shot after fearing an intruder was breaking into the apartment. Mattingly was recently reprimanded by Louisville’s police chief for a September email critical of department leadership and protesters. He remains in the department. Two other officers who fired their guns during the raid have been dismissed.
The response to Mattingly’s book deal highlighted a little known part of the publishing industry — distribution deals. In a companywide memo shared by the publisher Friday with The Associated Press, Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp called them an “important part of our overall business portfolio” and cited “the unsustainable precedent of rendering our judgment on the thousands of titles from independent publishers whose books we distribute to our accounts, but whose acquisitions we do not control.”
“You have our commitment to always be open to the exchange of opinions and points of view with our employees and authors,” Karp wrote. “At times, that commitment will be in conflict with the editorial choices of our distribution partners, which we must also respect. As a publisher, we seek a broad range of views for our lists. As a distributor, we have a limited and more detached role.”
Saeed Jones Memoir
In recent years, Simon & Schuster has faced outrage over titles the company itself planned to publish. It dropped a memoir by far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent supporter of the Jan. 6 march in Washington that led to the overrunning of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters seeking to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.
Saeed Jones Book
Hawley’s “The Tyranny of Big Tech” was acquired by Regnery Publishing, a conservative publisher distributed by Simon & Schuster.