PEN-longlisted essays from the co-founder of VerySmartBrothas.com, about growing up Black and gay in Pittsburgh.

DAMON YOUNG has something to say about modern black life. The only question is: Which Damon Young is speaking? In his debut collection, a "memoir in essays," Young fires an admirable volley into the robust field of memoirs by black American men. The book bridges his notable start as the co-founder and editor of the popular blog Very Smart Brothas and his most recent career as a cultural critic for mainstream publications. The shift in genre - from the snappy voice of blogging to the more erudite prose of the kind of long-form essays found in men's magazines like GQ, where Young is a columnist - is uneven at times. Young may have moved on up from the corners of the internet, but his reflections on modern life lack a consistent, confident point of view. Is he speaking as his former or current self? When, precisely, does his voice shift from "around the way" boy to reflective man? These essays toggle between Young's dueling narrative styles, and in the end the reader cannot be certain which is the definitive one. Still, "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker" is a worthwhile read, especially given the current popularity of the black male memoir as a genre. His most notable contribution to that field is a voice steeped not in "black cool" but in what one might call black male emo. Young has emotions, and he may have more than a touch of social anxiety. He is nervous and angst-ridden and smart enough to label his feelings. His description of the "day-to-day abstract humiliation" of not having a driver's license until he was 26 is a painfully honest account of the toll that ennui takes on black social mobility. The strongest essays are those in which he embraces that voice - the uncertain one that uses humor to interact with a world that expects him to be far more self-assured than he feels. When writing in that register, Young shines with often sad commentary. His memory of the time he and his father discovered that a 15year-old neighbor boy was working as a female prostitute packs an emotional wallop with a begrudging laugh. The vignette appears in a particularly moving story about how and why Young, raised in a black Pittsburgh conversational tradition known as the "dozens" ("also commonly known as roasting"), is so very bad at it when it matters most. That essay joins meditations on compulsive heterosexuality as among the most poignant in this collection. Like many young men who have publicly come of age during the black feminist theory era of popular culture, Young knows the right things to say. He knows that sex work can be predatory and that rape is violence and that heteronormativity is oppressive. Whether Young has figured out how to actually live these beliefs remains elusive. Still, many readers will relate to these essays if they've ever struggled to find their authentic selves beneath the visage of pop-culture caricatures of who one should be: black cool, millennial chic, radical Afro-centric slam poet, good guy or hood gangsta. Unlike some of his fellow black male memoirists, Young has not ascended to the Ivy League or retreated entirely into a world of wealth and privilege. Young just wants to be himself, even if he is not yet quite sure of who that is. TRESSIE mcmillan cottom is the author of "Thick: And Other Essays."

Columnist, blogger, and editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas, Young delivers a passionate, wryly bittersweet tribute to Black life in majority-white Pittsburgh. Raised by devoted working-class parents who, despite education, talent, and hard work, endure chronic homelessness and ferocious joblessness occasionally interrupted by microbursts of underemployment, Young bounces between suburban and urban schools, constantly reassessing his self-worth and his Blackness. His barbed riffs on gentrification, Black barber shops ( one of the few places where Black men with papers and without college degrees could find honest employment ), basketball, appropriate use of the word nigga, and the obtuseness of white privilege are sharply observed. Young articulates the mingled bemusement, rage, and terror of living in a relatively safe and superficially Black space . . . enveloped by whiteness. On the political front, he writes, For the first 2 hours following the election of Barack Obama, I knew how it felt to be a white American . . . I was reminded of the danger of entertaining that delusion when my black-ass president appeared on the screen and the only thought I could muster was, Please don't let those motherfuckers kill him.' A must read.--Lesley Williams Copyright 2019 Booklist

These darkly hilarious and forthcoming essays from Young, cofounder of social commentary blog Very Smart Brothas, center around the "perpetual surreality" of the African-American experience. For example, he writes with honesty and humor about his youthful worry that, if no white person called him the N word, his authenticity as a black man was in question. One of the funniest essays contains excerpts of his college-era poetry, often plagiarized from rap lyrics. In another, he recalls sneakily renting pornography as a teenager, feeling he was being watched by "my recently deceased aunt Toni, the first Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Maya Angelou, and the ghost of that guy Morgan Freeman played in Glory." He critiques toxic masculinity and admits to a major error in judgment: writing a "triflin'-ass" piece dismissing a rape victim's critique of rape culture. He wants, he realized, not to be just a "decent" man, but a man "worthy" of friendship with the women in his life. Young uses pop culture references and personal stories to look at a life molded by structural racism, the joy of having a family that holds together in a crisis, and the thrill of succeeding against difficult odds. Young's charm and wit make these essays a pleasure to read; his candid approach makes them memorable. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The co-founder and editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas documents the evolution of a city, a family, and a man using language that runs the gamut from irreverent to uproarious.The author, who is also a columnist for GQ, provides an inward-looking examination of the foibles, desires, and fears of a black man attempting to make his way in the world, the questions he asks along the way, and the destructive forces (sometimes controllable, sometimes not) that threaten to break him. This cultural landscape is steeped in the legacy of America's domestic immigrants who carved paths out of the South and into the steel and mining towns of Pennsylvania. Young's aspirational personal story parallels the trajectories of other descendants of the Great Migration. By sharing snapshots of his growth from adolescence into adulthood, he offers a glimpse into the crucible that shaped his personality and his politics, both of which came to define the aesthetic of VerySmartBrothas. But where VSB is rooted in the transactional here and now, the author's memoir explores the template upon which white supremacy is based and the recurring themes of oppression that permeate every aspect of black life in America. That Young does this vis--vis the tragicomedy of his own experiences makes each vignette that much more poignant. Everyone in America has some level of adjacency to the N-word: how it's used, how it's received, and the context in which the usage is deemed acceptable (or not). In addition to mining that explosive aspect of the cultural landscape, Young also looks at the extreme lengths to which men will go in search of love; how to know when to talk and when it's time to listen; and the fear of failing ones' family and how that sometimes manifests poorly in black men as opposed to more successful strategies employed by their partners. Health disparities, gentrification, and low expectations operating as a de facto form of violence on the bodies and minds of black people are among the author's many prescient themes.Young sharply conveys important truths with powerful effect. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.