Punch Me Up to the Gods (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction 2022 - Group G)

 Brian Broome’s debut book and memoir is not something I likely would have picked up on my own as the blurb makes it clear that this book does not shy away from portraying many dark and difficult subjects including abuse, struggles with sexuality, and addiction. Broome jumps throughout time in this memoir, using a loose framing device of vignettes from a bus ride through Pittsburgh and his observations of the interactions between a young Black boy, his father, and other people on the bus. Broome will have a few pages following Tuan and his father on the bus, which then naturally lead him to think about a related topic and personal story from Broome’s own life.

    Broome writes very readable and impactful prose and weaves a variety of themes together beautifully and coherently, even as they are often quite messy themes. The author has a way of looking head-on at difficult and shame-filled personal experiences with clarity and empathy for himself and for others. While this book is often very painful and uncomfortable to read, I do think it offers an intensely important perspective that I haven’t read in memoir before. Broome’s topics swim in and out of each other, covering the gendered and racialized socialization of children in one chapter and later deconstructing the concept of gay “pride” from the perspective of someone who has deep-rooted pain and internalized hatred and shame surrounding their sexuality and their race.

    One chapter that I thought was a particularly strong example of Broome’s storytelling actually discussed less overt violence and abuse than many of the other chapters, yet was genuinely emotional reading. This story briefly follows a relationship Broome had after meeting a white man from another country at a bar. Broome is attracted to this man, and when the man assumes that Broome plays basketball and finds that athleticism attractive, Broome decides to play along even though he has not played basketball since childhood. What follows for the reader is a slow motion car crash where you can see that this ongoing lie will blow up in Broome’s face but you also find yourself angry on Broome’s behalf that racist and gendered beliefs are following him around in this way. In an ironic offhand comment at the beginning of the story, the white man says something about Broome needing to escape the racism of the U.S. When he finds out that Broome has been lying about playing basketball, he never acknowledges his own reliance on racist stereotypes for sexualizing Black men. This is a really clever chapter that illustrates a strength of the book as a whole: the ability to get the reader on the side of a complicated narrator who is often an asshole and who clearly doesn’t like himself a lot of the time, and to really empathize with this person’s experience.