Boys and Oil
Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
by Taylor Brorby
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Pub Date Jun 07 2022 | Archive Date May 31 2022
W. W. Norton & Company | Liveright
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Description
From a young, gay environmentalist, a searing coming-of-age memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota, where homosexuality “seems akin to a ticking bomb.”
“I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.” So begins Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, “a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.”
In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.
About the Author: Taylor Brorby is an essayist and poet. The coeditor of Fracture, his work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Orion, and North American Review, where he is a contributing editor.
Advance Praise
"To put it simply, Boys and Oil is my most anticipated book of 2022. In this coming-of-age memoir, Brorby reflects on growing up gay in rural North Dakota, where mining and fracking has left indelible scars upon both the land and the people that call it home. Filled with some of the most beautiful language and deepest insights on activism, love, and belonging that I’ve read in years, Boys and Oil is essential reading for anyone interested in environmentalism and the American West." - Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"Brorby writes movingly about this experience and its consequences . . . Divided into seven parts, prefaced by a prologue and concluding with a coda, the memoir focuses on Brorby's life as an out gay man but makes room for his efforts as an environmental activist, experiencing the Bakken oil boom and fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. He ends the book by lamenting that, in North Dakota, 'there is no place for me.' But there is in the pages of this fine book." - Michael Cart, Booklist
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324090861 |
| PRICE | $27.95 (USD) |
Available on NetGalley
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