This is a hybrid event and will be hosted in-person in the West Hollywood Library Community Meeting Room as well as on Zoom. Please register at the link below to receive the link to the meeting via email.
https://library-lacounty-gov.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pd-Goqz4uGNNbzVuW720zsRrGxTK1VeLG
West Hollywood Library's LGBTQ+ Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of the month to discuss literary works of relevance and interest to the LGBTQ+ community.
Please contact the library to borrow a print copy of the book. eBook and eAudiobook are available through Libby app/OverDrive.
Summary provided by the publisher:
R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went—whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city—he found himself on the outside looking in.
In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an "other" through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what "normal" means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story.
