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It was the chapter about baking bread, Black lesbian feminist thinkers, and women musicians that got me hooked. Honestly, long before reaching page 146 in Another Word for Love (MCD, $28), writer and podcast host Carvell Wallace’s new memoir, I knew it was clearly one of the best books of 2024.
The Oakland-based writer starts with a short story of being homeless at age seven. Even after he was housed, loneliness and precariousness followed him through the years. Wallace’s chronicle of his childhood and teen years being Black and queer in 1970s and ’80s America flows organically. His always-chaotic, low-income, often-abusive family home is also brought into vivid focus. Wallace miraculously—not instantaneously, like a Cinderella story, but gruelingly, slowly, in tortured spurts—grows up. Throughout his journey, he dodges the metaphoric rocks and boulders thrown at anyone who doesn’t or refuses to fit into society’s expectations.
Wallace writes with breathtaking honesty, sharp humor, and marvelous prose. This is a love story of affirmation. Eventually, he becomes a father, enjoys professional success, achieves purpose in his craft, and sheds pretense as a Black queer man. Most radically, he chooses to exist in a place of gratitude and pleasure. Displaying obvious intellectual rigor and a growing emotional intelligence, it is clear that instead of descending permanently into past trauma, anger, depression, regret, or retribution for abuses suffered, he steers toward love.
But readers would be best to avoiding assuming from this description that the memoir is hokey self-help. He writes about his many reasons for focusing on beauty. Among them, “I write about beautiful things because I live in an ugly place in an ugly world.” Later, he is more pointed: “I write about beautiful things because I live in a country that has tried to kill me and every single one of my ancestors. Every single one. Continues to try. Will never stop trying.”
Wallace writes about beautiful things not so as to shape them into advice, nor to thrust forward a feel-good doctrine, and certainly, not out of ignorance. Knowing ugly, he’s perfectly positioned to live in its counterpart—and tell us its story. This book is going on my forever shelf, kept safely for the next time when life throws rocks.
ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE can be purchased at East Bay Book Sellers and other Bay Area retailers.
