BOOKS

when they tell you to be good | IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET

Prince Shakur’s debut memoir brilliantly mines his radicalization and self-realization through examinations of place, childhood, queer identity, and a history of uprisings.

When They Tell You to Be Good charts Prince Shakur’s political coming of age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer, and anarchist in Obama and Trump’s America. Shakur journeys from France, the Philippines, South Korea, and more to discover the depths of the Black experience, and engages in deep political questions while participating in movements like Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. By the end, Shakur reckons with his identity, his Jamaican family’s immigration to the US before his birth, and the intergenerational impacts of patriarchal and colonial violence.

A profoundly composed narrative parallel in identity to that of George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue and Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Shakur compels the reader to consume the political world of young, Black, queer, and radical millennials today.

A TIME, Washington Post, Amazon, BuzzFeed, Poets & Writers, Lambda Literary, Publishers Weekly, them, The Week, Book Riot, Philadelphia Inquirer, Book and Film Globe, AllArts, and Debutiful Best Book of Fall

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award

A Library Journal and Okayplayer Best Memoir of 2022

A New York Times Paperback To Read

TO WATCH HIS JOURNEY AS A DEBUT AUTHOR ON YOUTUBE #DebutDiaries

PRAISE

“Explores his childhood as a queer child of Jamaican immigrants in 2000s Ohio, his travels in response to America’s failure to ‘deliver me what I deserved as a young and curious Black person’ and his reckonings with colonial and patriarchal violence.”

— New York Times

“Edited by Hanif Abdurraqib and released by respected indie publisher Tin House, When They Tell You To Be Good is moving, illuminating, occasionally gorgeous, and often powerful.”

— Philadelphia Inquirer

“Shakur, a queer Jamaican American activist, demonstrates a talent for self-examination, not to mention literary prowess, in this account of the forces that shaped him.”

— The Washington Post

“Engaging—a tribute to resilience, and to building a better world.”

—them

— Keith M of Powell’s Books

“Searing. . . . a deeply personal reflection that celebrates self-discovery in the face of intergenerational trauma and a violent colonial legacy.”

— TIME Magazine

“The memoir also skillfully depicts complex familial dynamics, particularly Shakur’s relationship with his mother, with gut-wrenching transparency. Ultimately, upending family secrets in this memoir allows the author to reckon with his identity, in stylistically stunning and impactful prose.”

— Library Journal

“A scorching, nonlinear journey through a Black man’s search for self.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“This memoir of trauma, identity, and race will move you. Move you to tears. Move you to action. Shakur’s exploration of self is revelatory. He is the voice for readers forgotten by publishing.”

—Debutiful

"Electric. . . . moving. . . . captivating. . . . A searing account of self-discovery in the face of structural oppression."

- Publishers Weekly

“Shakur writes from a place of honesty that is both searing and poignant in its transparency. His story will resonate deeply for those who hold hidden stories of sadness and grief tightly behind a smiling public mask.”

—Khadijah Ali-Coleman

“In When They Tell You to Be Good, Prince Shakur attempts to make sense of being born into, flung into, both the maw of American violence and the legendary lures and pressures of Babylon. While reckoning with the history of the murders of family members in Jamaica alongside the American state’s history of murdering its Black beings, Prince charts a path through his queerness, his family history, films, literature, the Black radical tradition, as well as his own twin cultures, until an activist, a rigorously-fought-for sense of morality, and the contours of a lucid self comes into view. This is how I’ve come to locate myself in time and space and legacy, Prince seems to say, while unraveling a map of his own life. With When They Tell You to Be Good’s evergreen pairing of both finesse and confidence, it’s miraculous to witness Prince assert that he is his own best cartographer.”

—Bernard Ferguson

“A story that combines so much—sociocultural criticism, religion, and politics while centering on the microcosm of one Jamaican family and the aftermath of two male relatives’ untimely deaths. . . . Commands a tension and doesn’t release you well after the last sentence.”

—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America

“As inspiring as it is detailed. . . . Intelligently explores the complicated yet straightforward relationship many men of all colors deal with: the subject of race.”

—Zeke Thomas

“When They Tell You To Be Good is a swirl of indelible images, language and action that adds up to a daring coming-of-age memoir unbound by chronological time. Here, Prince Shakur insists on the irreducability of history, family, masculinity, race, identity, and geography. He refuses to allow manufactured borders between political, personal, and spiritual storytelling. This beautiful, antic, and deeply felt book makes the claim that love is not an emotion as much as it is a large and mysterious storm, encompassing deep pain and unbearable gulfs yet always reaching for attachment and understanding. I love the anarchic confidence with which Shakur claims visionary thinkers and writers right alongside the people in his neighborhood, his family, friends and comrades as his intellectual and emotional companions, establishing intimate, playful, heartbreaking and powerful connections across all boundaries. I know we will be hearing much more from this irrepressible new literary voice.”

—madeline ffitch