The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life is a young adult novel by Benjamin Saenz. A humorous and ultra-modern bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, it follows protagonist Salvador Silva (“Sal”) as he suffers the growing pains of young adulthood. Belonging to an atypical single-parent household with an adoptive father who is gay, he struggles with his peers’ derogatory remarks that represent his family as incomplete. At the same time, he juggles applying to college, the terminal illness of his adoptive grandmother, Mima, and new revelations about his birth family. Silva’s emotional struggle, raging at first, teaches him to vindicate and cling tightly to both his biological and adoptive heritage and to his friends, valuing loving relationships over the will to follow social norms. Saenz’s novel is well regarded for portraying a deeply humanizing account of an individual’s coming of age in contemporary American life.

Silva starts off his senior year of high school feeling uneasy and different, though he is unable to pinpoint why or how. In some ways, he feels as if he is preparing for an imminent change. His first day in school seems to confirm this, when a student refers to his father, Vicente, as a faggot. Silva lashes out in a flash of anger, pummeling him. That same semester, Silva learns that his adoptive grandmother, Mima, is suffering from a resurgence of cancer which had been thought to be in stable remission. Silva, very close to Mima, tells her he is afraid of her dying. In futility, he renounces God for taking her out of his life. Embedded in these struggles is his ongoing attempt to write a compelling college application. He procrastinates working on it all semester, becoming even more distracted when his father’s ex-boyfriend, Marcos, comes back. Silva reads the return as another affront to him, forcing him to share his father’s love with someone else he has never met. Silva is especially sensitive because Vicente has been his rock since the time in childhood when his mother died.

Meanwhile, Silva’s best friend, Sam, is also searching for her identity and struggling with personal issues. Harboring a fraught relationship with her mother, Sylvia, Sam, antsy about leaving for college as soon as possible, is obsessively proactive about her college applications. Her combative mother stalls this process, frustrating her even more. Sam tells Silva about a number of fights she and Silvia have at home. One night, when Sam flees a party after rejecting her boyfriend’s drunken sexual advance, she goes to Silva and his father. Sylvia arrives and spars with Sam, but, eventually, they make up. Sylvia gets to meet Silva and comes to appreciate his friendship with her daughter. Not long after, Sylvia dies in a tragic car accident. In the aftermath, Silva discovers that Vicente has been named as Sam’s guardian. She comes to live with them.



Another of Silva’s friends, Fito, has a mother who suffers from drug addiction. The problems cause great stress for him as he grapples with her addictive personality. After he saves up money throughout high school to fund his higher education, his mother takes it for herself to fund her drug lifestyle. Sam and Silva find Fito on the street, homeless. He tells them his story and Sam invites him to stay at her old house, which has not yet been taken off the market. After taking him in, he slowly integrates into Silva’s family as well.

In the early months of the next year, Mima passes away. Silva attends the funeral, where he suddenly realizes that he is transitioning from boy to man. He resolves to finish his college applications in the following days. One evening, he decides to finally open a letter that his father had given him. His mother had written it just before she died. The letter answers many of the questions that he has had as he had thought that his behavior may have been a result of his biological father's genes. Even though she leaves information in an envelope that will lead him to his biological father, he concludes that Vicente is his father and burns the envelope.

At the end of the novel, Marcos and Vicente decide to become partners. Silva finishes his college application to Columbia, where both of his biological parents were attending when they met. He buries his mother’s ashes and ruminates on the strangeness of their love for each other. More self-confident and outgoing than before, he trusts in his ability to navigate the world.