THE BROKEN KING

A prize-winning writer’s anguish.

Thomas bravely recounts the pain he suffered as a young victim of violent crime and the “madness” that befell him after the publication of his first novel. He was 7 when he was raped near his Boston home. He burned the clothes he was wearing, then shouldered the emotional scars in secret, cutting himself “to feel and to bleed.” As a literature professor, words are his tools, but being raped is “something I can neither interpret nor render. There’s nothing metaphorical. It is real: sweat, semen, and blood.” Without self-pity, he recounts his “self-medication” and alcoholism and recalls being targeted by racist police, his arms damaged by “violent handcuffings: walking while Black, driving while Black.” (Thomas now regards his debut Man Gone Down, about a Black man beset by bad fortune, as a sort of “suicide note.”) After it received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2009 and earned him “quasi-celebrity,” Thomas, grieving his father’s death and managing a fraught relationship with a brother he’d bailed out of jail, felt “confused” and “helpless.” He retreated from the world, spending two weeks in a “dark, cramped” crawl space in his Brooklyn house and later seeking help at a psychiatric hospital. In a masterfully understated scene, an encounter with a stranger in need proves crucial: “I knew I had to live.” Elsewhere in this gutsy book, Thomas uses Fenway Park as a backdrop for a discussion of bigotry in Boston in the 1970s and ’80s. “My country wants me dead,” but our racial problems are much deeper. “Most American notions” about race “are insane.” Thomas believes that one way to keep “from falling into darkness” is to try “to make something beautiful.” This book hits the mark.

A powerful memoir of childhood trauma, literary success, and mental illness.