WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival, "extreme" is an addiction of its own no matter what it's to

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival
MARC GAUSS
Sibling Rivalry Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is a fearless memoir of spirit, sex, and survival.

Raised in a strict Christian home where every desire was measured against sin, Marc Gauss grew up believing that love-especially the kind he felt for other men-was something that had to be hidden, prayed away, or punished. As he moves from small-town boyhood to college campuses, locker rooms, churches, and the neon freedom of gay nightlife, Gauss confronts the contradictions between the life he was taught to live and the truth of who he is.

Along the way he encounters cruelty, rejection, ecstatic freedom, and moments of devastating despair—including the kind of spiritual shame that nearly costs him his life. Told with disarming candor, humor, desire, and vulnerability, What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is the story of a man who survived religious judgment, sexual awakening, and the many identities others tried to force upon him. It is a memoir about reclaiming joy, owning one's body, and learning-finally-to live without apology.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one on Earth survives contact with high-control systems unchanged. It's not possible to be told how to be yourself without responding to that pressure somehow. Marc Gauss fell into many unhappy experiences on the road away from the horrors of his family's deeply unChristian take on christianity. His story is another block of evidence that "what does not kill me makes me stronger" is a choice of how to respond to your life's less carefree passages.

If you're hoping for non-fiction porn about sex work, not in here, you could be disappointed. Discussions of Sex are aplenty. The sex act itself isn't absent...it can't be. What's not given to you is the salacious stuff that nosy old queers (me) might've thought we were getting.

It's a better book than that. Becoming you, finding a Self in the noise of life is hard for most of us; all of us, I suspect, but I always leave wiggle room because if I don't some annoying twidgee or another will "well, actually" me and I'll be forced back to the poppet-making curse-casting ways of my English ancestors. Ways Author Gauss must've seen for the rage trap they are.

A book that will heal a hurt many gay men of every generation bear. A story that only adds to the world's stock of recovery from evil without succumbing to it examples. Well worth seeking out and spending a weekend with.

And I am positive I am not the first old queer guy to say that about, or to, Marc Gauss.