The title of this engaging memoir exploring Emmett de Monterey’s life growing up gay and disabled (he has cerebral palsy) in 1980s London comes from James Baldwin: “You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all…”
What follows across 26 chronological and self-contained stories of the self is how hard this proclamation is to obey in an ableist and homophobic society. Much of the book’s emotional weight comes from the way in which the world built in the family home, or with friends and peers, is constantly thrown up against reductive and violent language from outside institutions: the medical establishment, the education system, the church, members of the public who stare or infantilise. He comes out to his mum, who is sweetly welcoming and comforting, just after his GCSE year at school. For him, as so often for people discovering their sexuality (me included), the first words you hear connected to it are insults from peers.
