Boy Erased A Memoir

What You Need to Know Before Reading Boy Erased: A Memoir

Garrard Conley's Boy Erased: A Memoir came out in 2016, and it's not a comfortable read. It's a straightforward account of his time in a conversion therapy program run by a church called Love in Action in Arkansas. Conley was 19 when his parents sent him there after finding out he was gay. He was not a troubled kid by any other measure. He went to church, he played rugby, and he had no idea his parents were about to send him to a place that would try to "cure" him over the course of several weeks. The book has been taught in high schools and colleges. It's also been banned or challenged in several school districts since publication, usually around the language and the subject matter. If you're looking for something inspirational, look elsewhere. This is mostly an observational narrative.

Boy Erased A Memoir

I remember picking this up because someone at my old university recommended it, and honestly, I wasn't expecting much. The premise sounded like it could be preachy or heavy-handed. It isn't. The writing is measured and almost clinical at times, which turns out to be the right approach for what it's documenting. Conley doesn't yell at you. He just tells you what happened. The most difficult parts are the sections where he describes the actual therapy sessions. They weren't brutal in the cinematic sense. No one was dragged across the floor. What made them bearable or unbearable depended on the counselor and the method of the day. Some days were talking circles. Other days involved reciting scriptures back at him. One counselor asked him to imagine a room full of attractive men and then picture a woman entering it and making the men disappear. Conley wrote about how ridiculous that felt and how exhausting it was to pretend it didn't. There's a passage where he describes reading his mother's diary. She'd written entries about her fears regarding his sexuality, and they were honest in a way that didn't excuse her actions but made them understandable on a human level. That's the book's real power. It doesn't paint his parents as cartoon villains. They genuinely believed they were saving him, and that made it infinitely harder to fight against. I found myself frustrated with him more than once for not just walking out, but the thing about conversion therapy programs is that they're designed to make walking out feel impossible. You're told your family will disown you, your soul is at stake, and everyone you know will reject you. I've seen people in similar situations who left immediately, but I've also seen people stay longer than they should have. It's not a failure of character. It's a failure of the system to account for human attachment.

The book does stumble a bit in the final chapters. After Conley leaves the program, there's a period where he tries to make sense of what happened, and the writing becomes more abstract than the rest of the book. It still works, but the sharpness dulls. I think that's intentional, though. Living through the aftermath doesn't have the same clarity as living through the event. If you're teaching this book, you'll want to prepare students for the fact that there is no neat resolution. Conley doesn't emerge from the program suddenly healed. He survives it, which is different. Several critics have pointed out that the film adaptation softens some of the harder edges. Joel Edgerton's version ends on a more redemptive note than the book does. That's worth mentioning if you're comparing the two. The memoir ran for about 300 pages and is structured chronologically. There are no fancy flashbacks or narrative tricks. It's exactly what it says it is. Some readers find that boring. I find it refreshing. When you're reading about something as heavy as conversion therapy, I'd rather not be distracted by literary flourishes.

I should mention that there are content warnings attached to this book. Sexual content, religious trauma, family rejection. It's not graphic in a pornographic way, but it does deal with topics that can be triggering. If you're assigning this in a classroom, a disclaimer goes a long way. There are a few things the book doesn't cover that you might wish it did. Conley doesn't go deeply into the legal or political aspects of conversion therapy bans. He doesn't interview other participants. It's strictly his own experience, and that's fine, but it means the broader context is thin. If you want that, pairing it with something like The Outlaw Army by David K. Johnson or reports from the Williams Institute would fill in the gaps. The book is available through most major retailers, libraries, and audiobook platforms. The audiobook is narrated by MacLeod Andrews, and it's solid. Not everyone wants a performed version of something this raw, but Andrews doesn't melodramatize it. He keeps the same tone as the prose.

I won't pretend this is a perfect book. It has weaknesses. But it's important, and it's one of the few firsthand accounts that doesn't read like a research paper disguised as memoir. Conley writes like someone who had to survive something and then had to figure out how to talk about it afterward. The difficulty of that process shows in the writing.