Laymon begins his story with a powerful and surprising negation: “I did not want to write to you,” he says. “I wanted to write a lie” (1). He can’t write a reassuring, “titillating” memoir about Black life that follows the usual tropes of resilience and persistence. Instead, “I started over and wrote what we hoped I’d forget” (2).

Laymon tells stories about his childhood with his mother, who turns out to be the “you” he’s addressing; he’ll continue to speak to his mother in the second person throughout the book. He remembers raking in slot-machine quarters together and praying for a woman they saw being assaulted after they weren’t able to rescue her themselves. Laymon has a conflicted relationship with his mom, loving her dearly even as he suffered violence at her hands—violence she doesn’t always admit to having committed.

Talking honestly about the past has never been easy for Laymon’s family. On a visit to his grandmother, who’s bedridden with a gangrenous foot from diabetes, he tries to raise big questions: “I knelt and asked whether she minded if we talked about words, memory, emergencies, weight, and sexual violence in our family” (6). Though his grandmother is a brave woman who loves him deeply, she can’t quite face this conversation yet.