How to Live Free in a Dangerous World

*Phenomenal.... A memoir that opens into the world, with brilliance, courage, and elegant prose.... This is a book to read, read again, and remember. Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America*

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

One of Esquire's Best Memoirs of 2024
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Elle, Them, Book Riot, LitHub, Stylecaster, and Chicago Review of Books
**
In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.

Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location and their deepest emotions to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

Autorentext

Shayla Lawson

Klappentext

"Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist. This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self. Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year's Eve in Mexico City, Lawson's travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal. Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location-and their deepest emotions-to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms"--

Zusammenfassung
*“Phenomenal.... A memoir that opens into the world, with brilliance, courage, and elegant prose.... This is a book to read, read again, and remember.”—Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America*

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

One of Esquire's Best Memoirs of 2024
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Elle, Them, Book Riot, LitHub, Stylecaster, and Chicago Review of Books
**
In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.

Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

Leseprobe
On Firsts

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Let's begin at the beginning.

The weather is winter. The time, 1981. The only place in the world to be, Minneapolis. First Avenue & 7th. A music venue. First row. The artist is local-years from now, everybody who wants to be anybody will lie and say they had tickets, but you do. Three. Half-smiling on the dashboard of a Chrysler station wagon. One hundred miles south, in a blizzard, back tires sunk in eight feet of snow.

Most of what follows is meant to be true and what's not, probably even more so. Outside the car, the muffled buzz of "Soft and Wet" rocks the wood-paneled LeBaron, the bass replaced by the car engine, exhaust coughing holes through chunks of ice. Two men huff and slip in matching pairs of wing tips while their shovels scratch out a hard timpani on the gravel. Polished, ruined. Inside, the car is dark and hot, the windows blind with fog. The woman in the back seat opens her coat as pearls of sweat unzip down her chest. She scoots to the console, turns the defroster on high, and switches the cassette in the tape deck. Dirty Mind. The windows start to clear. She wipes a spot clean on the windshield with the back of her dress sleeve, gold lamé, and its streaks make the streetlamp under snowflakes look like a strobe light. The vents scream loud and crowded over the song on cassette and she lies back on the crushed velvet interior, tapping her pregnant belly. Everyone will say that they made it, but you were actually there.

My parents. I'm there too. Barely alive, just a thrum under the heartbeat of the woman who knows all the words to "When You Were Mine" in the front row. Prince was first and I was second. This became my origin story. Of the two men we came with, it took me a while to know who was actually first, my father, the three of them so thick as thieves by the time I was born it was more conceivable that I was the child of all three of them than one or the other. This was their gift to me. A black and brilliant world. A world full of music that knows the cold. A promiscuity that understands destruction. A few years later, one of the men left us all behind to become an astronaut, the first Black man to walk in space. And so began my family.

In the beginning was darkness and Prince was music. Everything I remember about the womb carries the sound of arpeggiators. When I came out, it took me longer than most to understand I do things differently. I wasn't built for anything but. I wanted to be P…