Pre-Read notes:

I love memoirs. I spent some time homeless in my early adulthood, so I was curious about this story.

Final Review

"I guess that’s what time does, changes the meaning of things. I try not to bother too much about figuring out which truth is the truest. A lot of things, I have learned, can be true at once." p.5

Review summary and recommendations:

I was immediately drawn to the description for this memoir, as I'm always interested in narratives from people who have spent time in homelessness. I'm always interested to know how people escape this circumstance. I find this kind of content challenging, especially when the story belongs to a homeless kid, as I found here.

I love this book for more reasons than just this one, though I did connect very honestly to this part of Wallace's narrative. It's also beautifully written, and Wallace explores important themes from his childhood, such as how masculinity is socialized in young boys, and being poor among a culture of people who have much more than you do.

I recommend this book to readers who enjoy memoir, appreciate philosophy, and are drawn to stories about people who come from terrible childhoods redeeming themselves and their lives.

"When your oppression is communal, your liberation must be as well." p151

Reading Notes

Three (or more) things I loved:

1. "Maybe it was less than a year but it felt like a long time, full of endings and tiny deaths." p3 This is what a year of homelessness felt to me, at 19. I never speak about that time in my life but this makes me feel seen.

2. In the chapter entitled "The Razors," the author uses repetition to brilliant effect. But also, trigger warning for violence against women and children, and child SA.

3. "Giving pain was how you proved your right to exist, to be left alone, to be granted full humanity." p22 From a passage about how the author and the other boys around him were socialized. It's a profound statement about how we teach masculinity to young kids.

4. "Everyone in my neighborhood was white. Everyone in all my classes and on my school bus was white. Everyone in my home was white. I was stranded. It was like living on the moon." p27 Wonderful description, and such an important statement.

Rating: 💗💖❤️‍🔥💔💞 /5 loves and other words for it
Recommend? Yes!
Finished: Dec 13 '24
Format: digital arc, NetGalley; digital, Libby
Read this book if you like:
🗣 memoir
🏚 stories of difficult childhoods
🏕 stories about homelessness
🌄 redemption stories

Thank you to the author Carvell Wallace, publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for an advance digital copy of ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE. All views are mine.
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Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishing Company for this Advanced Readers Copy of Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace!

A generation ago almost, there was a cultural obsession, or something like it, over memoir.

Not just a standard fascinating life story with tragedy and maybe addiction and recovery and resilience, but some kind of layered intersection of traumas and healing or redemption. I learned this because as a young writer who hadn’t yet learned to shield and protect my gift from unsolicited advice about what or how I should write, people often heard my path to writing and reading and said, “You should write your story down.” And because I am a literal literary person, I did.

I started where I think most people who aspire to be memoirists start, by writing my life story in chronological order. (My favorite version of this was the way that Serena and Venus Williams’ dad, Richard Williams, began his memoir, by starting in the womb. I didn’t go quite that far back.) The universal response to the drafts I shared with editors was that this was boring, mostly because I was not and I am not still, a celebrity.

So then I was like, "Oh! I need…a theme.” But how do you make thematic material from poverty then marginally making it, to becoming middle class as a Black woman in America? As much of a real miracle as that really is, so are a lot of ways that people who are meant to perish make it in the world. Still, this is writing — trying to write what’s in you that is yours to write even if you have no idea what you’re actually doing. I wrote it according to wack themes like running or stray cats. Those old drafts were the old people that I would eventually lose, as Carvell Wallace writes in one of the many beautiful passages in Another Word for Love: A Memoir.

Then my parents died. My father first, my mother soon after. My story, the self-published memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans was a burning tome I needed out of me to move on and to become the adult orphan who had also kind of been a child orphan but also not really.

What I learned over the course of 20 years trying and failing and being rejected and then self-publishing is that Maya Angelou made memoir look easy and it is not. What you need for a beautiful and powerful memoir is a litany of experience, a humbled and wise perspective and an understanding of the thematic soul ties that bind us all.

These are the qualities of Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace whose prose grabbed me and would not let go. Wallace is a journalist who writes with a unique combination of distance and specificity about his journey to loving himself and others. Rare to see Black men love in public or tell about how they love in private without centering their pain.

I love that in the language of therapy, he uses I language, that he doesn’t try to tell anyone what other people were feeling and he does not make excuses for his mistakes, but rather he lays bare his triumphs - which we celebrate with him — and his failures, which made this reader respect his honesty and his loyalty to himself, and his commitment to real, genuine love.

I found myself highlighting whole paragraphs in my Kindle app because I could relate so hard to so many of his sentiments, like this: “…I don’t want to write about the people who have hurt me. They are among the dying. You are among the dying. To be among the dying, and to know it, the feeling that gives you, that is another word for love.”

Noticing beauty in nature, and within ourselves, is another synonym for love, and I was once a failed gardener, so this struck me, too: “Whenever you see a clump of daffodils standing alone in a field, it is a sign that someone once tried to make something beautiful there.” I can say with total admiration and truth that Carvell Wallace’s memoir is like that clump of daffodils, except that it is much more than that, it is an entire field of beautiful flowers where he has made beauty that cannot and should not be denied.

Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace is a memoir about love and healing. Wallace has been through so many difficult times, but he still values love and healing. He says, "God creates beautiful things so that we cannot understand them. I think that might be the entire point: to be in the humility of unknowing. The cherry blossoms have been captured on posters and calendars and tattoos and playing cards and animation forever. And still under the right circumstances, under the right amount of pain, the sight of one can literally save your life. We will never understand how or why that works, nor will we ever be able to capture it. That is god's flex. Beauty is meant to remind us that we can never fully understand all there is to understand. Beauty is meant to pleasantly put us all in our places." Wallace's story was extremely inspirational, and I definitely recommend it. Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital review copy. All opinions are my own.

Memory is power in this book. Carvell Wallace faces his experiences in the mirror, no matter how heavy they are. The writing is also straightforward, which makes this book a page-turner.

Wallace's debut memoir-in-essays reflects on a traumatic upbringing that taught him to reject stereotypical masculinity and celebrate the beauty in the everyday. He candidly acknowledges wrongs that have been done—to him personally and to Black people collectively. But he also relates what he has learned about sexuality and spirituality, both of which provoke openness to love and wonder. Through vividly recreated scenes, Wallace captures the emotions of childhood. Although his recollections of sexual abuse can be difficult to read about, some of the later "Stories About Return" provide a sort of antidote, as Wallace realizes the power of consent and reclaims a sense of ownership and joy in his bisexuality. Marriage and parenting, overcoming addiction, his mother's death, and the pandemic are other topics in these varied and relatable autobiographical essays.

I was captivated by this book from start to finish. I'm glad that Carvell Wallace was able to break the cycle and that they healed from the abuse they encountered in their life.

A memoir as a series of essays, themed around the experience of love in all forms—familial love as a child, a partner, and a parent, friendship, romantic love, sex, self love, loss and grief. Occasionally meandering, ultimately quite beautiful.

I first encountered Carvell Wallace as the host of Slate’s parenting podcast, and fell in love with his honest wisdom about parenting. I leapt at the chance to read his book and was not disappointed! This book is gorgeous, open, powerful!

I was really impressed with this one. It moves from one thing to the next and by the end it feels like a different book from where you started, but in a good way. It shows growth. The writing is beautiful and the level of vulnerability is impressive.

All opinions of this book are exclusively my own. I received a copy of this book from net galley.
I didn’t enjoy this book. Once the LIST of rappers ran nearly a page I felt I could no longer relate. I like to look up and or listen to a musician that I am unfamiliar with and quite honestly I didn’t have the time nor interest. I am guessing this book is not geared to a late middle age , suburban white woman that isn’t interested in podcasts. I was so excited to open my mind to something new but too many details.

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan for the ARC!

I really wanted to love this, but it feels incomplete, and not necessarily in a way that could be fixed with more editing.

"Another Word for Love" is the rare memoir that would benefit from more context. Across the book, Carvell Wallace becomes every possible self, and yet—we don’t get to see much of the journey. This is always the difficulty of this genre, as some things should just remain private for the author’s protection, but the problem is that it undermines the book’s aspirations of importance.

The book’s marketing copy promotes it by saying, “It could be called a theory of life itself—a theory of being that will leave you open to the wonder of the world.”


That’s a bold pitch, and its biblical grandiosity feels woven into the book at almost every level.

The authorial voice is almost perpetually heightened, and anecdotes such as the racially charged antagonism in “The Finger” actually feel more disposable because they seem like they exist primarily to be "important." Readers are not allowed to come to their own conclusions because they are constantly reminded that they will be transformed from reading. These decisions pile up, eventually working their way into the structure of the entire book, a four-part framing device that never quite seems justified.

Most chapters build to the what seems like the first part of an epiphany, but they are cut short by reflections that amount to “life is short” or “life is complicated” or “life is precious.” The book Is ostensibly about the multiplicity of love—the idea that it is manifested in countless ways. The problem, however, is that it feels like each chapter is obligated to retrofit all experience into a nebulous “love is everything.” As the book progresses, that premise simply becomes shakier until it spirals out of control, culminating in an ending that feels truncated. Likewise, much of the reflection is tainted by an over-reliance on the idea that “men are taught” to be unloving. There’s certainly validity to this sentiment, but its frequency begins to read like someone who is volunteering their complicity to avoid accountability. It left me feeling squeamish.

I recognize that these critiques might sound harsh, but they come from a place of disappointment, not disdain. "Another Word for Love" is a bummer to read because it’s clear there are so many great ideas that could be cultivated if any of them were given precedence and the time to develop. There are a few moments where the book comes together in breathtaking ways, such as the comparison between whipping scars and lightning scars in “The Lightning.” The image is effective, evocative, and something I would have loved to see more of.

Elsewhere, there’s a playfulness in chapters like “The Clothes” where the author experiments with women’s clothing. This is one of the few instances where the author seems willing to interrogate their self-mythology, and the result is one of the most endearing and revelatory chapters in the book. Similarly, parts of “The Quilt” showcase the kind of reflection that would have strengthened the rest of the book. For a brief moment, readers can see the narrator before the chapter abruptly ends. Another great chapter is “The Universe,” which details Wallace’s unexpected professional rise. I also really admired the ache Wallace conveys in “The Sex.” With each of these chapters, I found myself wishing they were expanded into their own memoirs, rather than acting as pieces of a collage in their current form.

As it stands, this book feels like an example of someone’s genre expertise not transferring to long-form writing. Even so, I hope Carvell Wallace writes another memoir, one that recognizes that to be something, a book can’t be everything.