Not long ago, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle and Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography back-to-back. I know Sampsell largely through his fiction — short, sometimes jarring, oftentimes sexually charged — and via his role as publisher of Future Tense Publishing. I came to Coates’s memoir as a reader of his work at The Atlantic — in a single day, his blog there can cover topics ranging from the Civil War to 80s hip-hop to online role-playing communities. I had hoped to write some sort of essay encompassing both – each book is definitely worth your time, and both Sampsell and Coates do a fine job of evoking their younger selves with warts and all. These are, for lack of a less awkward phrase, books I’d like to go on record as having endorsed.
Actually coming up with something lengthier than the above paragraph has been hard, though. Some of it, I think, has to do with just how central each author’s family is to the book in question. I don’t have siblings myself, and that makes it harder for me to understand the relationships between siblings — something that has a significant role in each of these two books. Something I’m beginning to work on in my own fiction is dealing with limitations — of writing about people looking at situations that are beyond the scope of their comprehension. This experience of essentially staring at a blank screen, trying to formulate thoughts beyond “you should read these books,” has been strangely edifying. Though it’s also made me think about resurrecting a theoretical project I mentioned to someone offhandedly a few years ago: trying to come up with a sort of master list of only-child lit. Though that might well be a very only-child thing to do.