BAD BOY: A Memoir
Walter Dean Myers
Harpercollins Juvenile Books
Young Adult
ISBN: 0060295236

• Read an Excerpt

Has anyone else noticed that memoir writing seems to have replaced baseball and Monopoly as the Great American Pastime? Everybody --- from popstars to pro wrestlers to the pizza delivery guy --- is succumbing to the therapeutic (i.e., helping yourself) and philanthropic (i.e., helping others) lure of memoiring. In the same vein as the insufferable Boy-Band-Craze, the literary world is being deluged with more than a few memoirs that are, well, to be perfectly honest, not that good.

Thank God the YA community now has cause to hold its head high: Its most recent contribution to the memoir genre, BAD BOY, comes from the amazingly prolific, award-winning, critically acclaimed, altogether extraordinary Walter Dean Myers.

Born into a rather confusing family situation (I shall not even attempt to retrace the family tree), Myers grew up in Harlem during the '40s and '50s. A cultural mecca for African Americans --- crossing the paths of Langston Hughes or Jackie Robinson on the city sidewalks was not an uncommon event --- Harlem had a long, rich literary tradition, and a spirit of celebration of African American heritage and identity seemed to effuse the air of Harlem during those years.

However, there was little, if any, "celebration of identity" for Myers...

Plagued by both a severe speech impediment that left him perpetually frustrated and a plain old predisposition for troublemaking, Myers was, to put it mildly, a "handful" --- more specifically, he was highly energetic with a temper like a mad-Irishman and a propensity for beating up his peers and breaking his parents cherished possessions if he didn't get his way. Sure, it was generally agreed that the young Myers was smarter than the average child, but it was also unanimously agreed that he was a gigantic pain in the...

Amid all the tempestuousness of his teenage years --- dropping in out and of high school (Stuyvestant, to be exact; an elite public school that takes only the best and brightest around New York), becoming involved with a gang, getting in fights --- the one constant in Myers life was a love of reading and writing. The poetry of Dylan Thomas was a particular favorite, as was reading Camus, Balzac, and Joyce in Central Park (in lieu of school, of course).

Yet as much as Myers loved reading and was obviously a gifted writer --- perhaps the only positive things his teachers ever had to say about him --- his interest in these things did not offer him solace from the ever-looming angst of adolescence as they would for some teens. Rather, his passion for great works of literature was one of the primary contributors to his ever-deepening identity crisis.

As we all can attest to, the life of a teenager is fraught with insecurity, self-doubt, confusion, disenchantment, boredom, and loneliness (there are, of course, numerous other dismal descriptives, but I believe the point has been sufficiently made). For Myers, though, the typical existential questions facing a teen --- Who am I? What am I going to do with my life? Does anyone really understand me? --- were made infinitely more complex by the fact of his race and cultural influences. What does it mean to be black man? And does the fact that I like poetry and hope one day to be a writer make me any less of man? Does it make me any less black?

"I didn't see anybody defining a real man as somebody who paid a lot of attention to books... When I thought of the major careers, I thought of whites, not blacks. When I thought of maleness, I thought of whites with political or economic power and blacks with muscle. My definition of a black man was, except for the rare exception, a man without an exceptional career, and a man who had to define his maleness by how muscular he was."

Walter Dean Myers doesn't offer any easy answers. You won't come away from reading this memoir saying, "Ah, yes, the "being black" question is no longer a mystery to me." Rather, with BAD BOY Myers uses his own life to poignantly illustrate a point that is so very important it warrants repeating a million times over: Being an African American teenager (any teenager, really) from a working class neighborhood who likes playing sports and writing poetry and reading James Joyce in the park does not make you an abnormal freak, less of a man, or a sellout to your culture or community. Coming to terms with this realization may prove emotionally and psychologically tumultuous, but make no mistake, these qualities can (and, frankly, should more often) peacefully and productively coexist in one person.

   --- Reviewed by Sarah Brennan

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