MORE THAN A MEMOIR
By BRADY JONES
@modernangelo
If you didn’t know Casey Gerald - and if you haven’t read his memoir, “There Will Be No Miracles Here” - you would be tempted to see a kind of poster child for the “American Dream”: a poor Black kid who worked hard to earn his way to Yale and onto their football team, who went on to earn his MBA from Harvard Business School, who founded a nonprofit, who became a TED Talks celebrity, who has been featured on numerous prominent magazine covers … a man who has “made it.”
And he might tell you you’re missing the racist forest for the white savior trees.
Gerald’s voice - calm and contemplative both in stereo and on the page - brings the realities of intersectionality front and center, while indicting an entire system built by hundreds of years of racism, classism, and strife that’s been glossed over by the success stories we put on magazine-rack pedestals: mythical statues that serve to condemn those who don’t measure up.
Through honest and emotional memories of his inner struggles with family, faith, sexuality, and a social system built and maintained by inequality, Gerald paints a complex portrait of his American experience while bearing his own soul to the reader.
As NPR’s book reviewer Michael Schaub wrote: “Gerald's memoir is remarkable on every level: He's a natural storyteller whose writing is absolutely gorgeous. By breaking every rule of the business memoir genre, he's created something unique and sublime: a beautiful chronicle of a life as yet unfinished, and a book that refuses to give in to the glib or sentimental.
Gerald would probably roll his eyes at the phrasing, but his memoir is a shining and sincere miracle of a book.”
“This was the first time I learned how far you can make it in America if you have enough disregard for your personal welfare. Maybe that’s why football is the national pastime.”
Casey Gerald, the author and motivational speaker, shares a deeply personal glimpse into his thoughts on identity, courage and spirituality.
Q&A — New York Magazine
“I think the world, and the way of living, that my generation inherited is over. It’s dead. It’s dying and it needs to die. I had this line from Flaubert’s letters that was quoted by Marguerite Yourcenar, who wrote Memoirs of Hadrian. Why Hadrian was so important is, Flaubert says, “There was a time when the gods have ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come and man stood alone.” I think that’s where we are. I love my parents, but they failed me. I love this country, but it has failed me, and it’s failed so many people. Every promise my generation was given has been compromised. The institutions have been compromised. You can’t be lied to to the degree my generation has and not be traumatized. I think we are in the early days of a sort of beautiful and dangerous revolution that is starting on the inside.”
Read the rest here.
