The Broken King deserves a better review than I am capable of writing, nevertheless I’ll try. First of all: ALL the trigger warnings. If you can think of something that triggers you, it’s in this book.

Michael Thomas’ autobiography – or, if you prefer, six memoirs in one, each devoted to a part of his life, forming a never complete picture – is a tough read. I normally don’t take over two weeks to read 400-ish pages, but I needed LOTS of breaks. The scary thing is that we share a lot – no, I can’t really relate to being Black in the US (especially in 2025…), nor do I have the experience of being a tenured professor, but there’s much more. We’re both survivors of…many things Thomas writes about. It was tough reading about them (some things are left off-page and I was thankful for that) and it was also validating and helpful. I haven’t read this book because I enjoy suffering.

There is no happy ending where Thomas, magically cured from his mental illness and his past, falls into the arms of his loving family and all of them laugh as they practice yoga at sunrise. There’s little wellness to be found. Instead, The Broken King presents a life that seems to have taken many lifetimes; as the blurb says, the book “builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind’s journey into and out of madness.” I don’t know about the ‘out’ bit. There really isn’t an out bit. When I was reading the final pages, I kept checking the page count, hoping for the out bit.

The writing is gorgeous. It reveals a lot – there are time jumps, sudden introductions of people who haven’t been mentioned before, and yet there is a fluidity to the book, except the fluid is more like tar. It’s a book about pain and anguish and literature and love and otherness and being othered. About never fitting anywhere, even inside your own head. If it were fiction, I’d describe it the way my novels have been described – ‘grimdark AF’. It isn’t, although sometimes I wished it were.

The final section of the book made me feel concerned about the author, because it makes The Broken King feel like a very elaborate suicide note. In fact, Thomas says it, regarding his novel Man Gone Down – “It still seems to me a novel-length suicide note, and that is the dominant autobiographical content. Now, however, I know rather than the protagonist’s, it’s mine.” The six-part structure gives a glimpse into how good Thomas is at compartmentalising, but the final part brings it all together and shows that there is a whole, and that whole is deeply alienated. I thought a few times ‘this man needs a hug’ only to realise I was really thinking about my own reflection in Thomas’s words.

I decided not to rate this book, because I simply can’t. The 1-5 stars system fails here. On some levels it’s six out of five. On other… well, I can’t rate it and so I won’t. I feel too personally about it. I want to protect this book and I have a tendency to want to save wounded animals, and while Thomas has been deeply wounded over and over again, I’d argue he might be bent, very deeply, but remains unbroken. A broken mind could never write The Broken King and dare to send it to a publisher, for everyone to see.

I received a copy of the book from NetGalley. This did not influence my opinion.

[Since NetGalley requires a rating, I rated the book 5/5.]