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Out Now: Bullied

Published onOct 21, 2021
Out Now: Bullied
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“Jonathan Alexander has always been a provocative, scintillating writer, but with Bullied he has joined the ranks of our finest essayists. More than an examination of bullying and its dynamics, it is part memoir, part auto-analysis, part theoretical exploration, part jeremiad, and part ecstasis—a book that brilliantly examines desire, trauma, hate, longing, and the necessity and the impossibility of fully understanding our overdetermined, overwhelming, overstuffed, always underarticulated individual stories as they are structured and restructured by systems of power, violence, oppression, and, finally, resistance.”

~ Tom Lutz, American Book Award winner and author, most recently, of Aimlessness and Born Slippy

About the Book

What happens when the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand — and live with — definitive feelings of having been abused when the origin of those feelings won’t adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience?

In Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, Jonathan Alexander meditates on how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he’d been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” — a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men. Story though it was, Alexander maintains that some form of abuse did occur.

In writing that is at turns reflective, analytic, and hallucinatory, Alexander traces what it means to suffer homophobic abuse when such is diffused across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics — as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in young Alexander’s life.

Along the way, Alexander reflects on Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, cruising, teaching young adult fiction about rape, and a host of other oddly but intimately related topics.

About the Author

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. His previous critical memoirs include Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot, available from Fordham University Press. For more information, see http://www.the-blank-page.com.

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