Charles M Blow

Fire Shut Up in My Bones: a Memoir Charles M Blow

Publisher Marketing: A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past"New York Times" columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up a place where slavery's legacy was felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence. Charles's attachment to his mother a fiercely driven women with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning cannot protect him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It's damage that triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning. Finally, Charles escapes to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity after a passage of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual privilege that feels like everything he's ever needed and wanted, until he's called upon, himself, to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse. A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant." Contributor Bio:  Blow, Charles M Charles M. Blow has been a columnist at the New York Times since 2008 and has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and HBO. He lives in Brooklyn with his three children.