Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace’s debut memoir, offers a compassionate look at a complicated coming of age. Across a series of vignettes, the author and journalist explores what it was like to grow up Black and intermittently homeless in the 1980s suburbs of Pittsburgh. Throughout, he details the ways in which his young single mother shaped him, beginning with a childhood spent being encouraged to face his fears. But his mother’s own insecurities and anxieties loomed large and, as he captures in unwavering terms, the men she surrounded herself with warped his understanding of masculinity, leading him to hide his own queerness for much of his youth. Yet Wallace, now a parent to two adult children, never passes judgment on his mom for what happened all those years ago. Instead, his book offers a cathartic account of how he freed himself from the traumas of his past.
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