During Holy Week and Easter, the Saint Thomas Book Club will discuss Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family by Garrard Conley.
Boy Erased tells Conley’s story of confronting and accepting his sexuality and the conversion program his religious parents imposed upon him. As a young man, Conley grew up the son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life on small-town Arkansas. When he was 19, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life.
By confronting his buried past and the burden of a life lived in shadow, Garrard traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. At times heart-breaking, at times triumphant, this memoir is a testament to love that survives despite all odds.
Join us Tuesdays at the South Room, beginning April 16 at 10:00 am.
