GLR November-December 2025

ors,” and “nineteenth-century paintings.” The story of Debré’s parents, born into this aristocratic mi lieu, begins as a romance—he was a journalist, she a model— but descends into a history of addiction and decline from opium to heroin to whisky and pills, concluding with intravenous doses of morphine that the narrator gives her father on his deathbed. She never lashes out at her parents, except in a satirical fantasy scene in which she excoriates the whole family with an explicit coming-out speech. She lashes out instead at childhood, at fam ily itself—she wants them eliminated. Parsing the narrator’s emotions can be challenging. Having made much of her aristocratic heritage, having depicted the

severity of her parents’ addictions, their harrowing fall to poverty, the narrator confounds us: “I would have written the same book with any other parents,” Debré writes. Notable among her few possessions is a rarified collection of artifacts that embody her aristocratic heritage: Rolex watch, Church’s shoes, Habit Rouge cologne. No one else is writing quite like Debré, but I’d shelve her work near Edward St. Aubyn, Édouard Louis, Garth Greenwell, and the late Heather Lewis. In her provocative trilogy, she writes about disintegration and transformation and gives us her self as a character, a phoenix from the flames, continuing her family name.

The Fragility of James Baldwin

I N HER NEW BIOGRAPHY of James Baldwin, Magdalena J. Zaborowska is hopelessly in love with her subject, but this doesn’t distract her from prob ing deep into the messy complexities and vulnerabilities that shadowed Baldwin throughout his life. She admits that she feels as if she has known him for a lifetime, though the two never met. She begins her

ing and were smitten by his “rhetorical dex terity, charismatic delivery, scintillating wit, and sharp dress.” He smoked incessantly and drank whiskey while pounding his typewriter throughout the night. He was convinced that writing would tame the demons that haunted him. He abandoned the church as a young man, placing his faith in writing to take him to some sort of prom

E LAINE M ARGOLIN

JAMES BALDWIN The Life Album by Magdalena J. Zaborowska Yale Univ. Press. 320 pages, $28.

book by thanking Baldwin for the “solace and salvation I have found in your vision of humanity.” She adds: “Like others, you strove to reconcile irreconcilables—grace, joy, and passion, loss, pain, and despair. You came from Harlem, a true native son, a Black man born into poverty, yet you redefined the norms of racial and sexual identity long before most of us accepted the possibility of doing so.” Zaborowska delves into Baldwin’s early works, such as the autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and his essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), as well as later novels like If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), which con tained more complex notions of sexuality that anticipated the explosion of genderfluid, trans, and nonbinary identities. We feel the author always trying to get closer to him and wonder ing how he was able to keep his heart pure and filled with love and hope despite the despair that often overtook him. Baldwin was devoted to the creation of a Black queer humanism that evolved as he did. Zaborowska earned her master’s degree in Poland in 1987 and received her doctorate from the University of Oregon, where she began writing extensively on sexuality, gender, and race theory. The beauty of this book is that she leaves most of the academic jargon behind and focuses instead on Baldwin’s exuberant boisterousness. He is the superstar, and she wants to present not just the public man but also the “private, vulnerable, and messy man” that we don’t know about. So, who was the real James Baldwin? He was an illegiti mate child, which bothered him throughout his life. His stepfa ther was a preacher who was often violent with him and his eight younger half-siblings. Many remember Baldwin as charm

ised land. Baldwin was a timid boy who was very close to his mother. He had bulging eyes and an effeminate manner. His writing was immediately recognized for what Caryl Phillips described as his “gracefully lilting sentences … mutable words, and elliptical phrases, endlessly circl[ing] back on themselves.” He had dreams of becoming a painter, or a musician, or even an actor,

but writing consumed him. He was offended by the stereotypi cal and sentimental portraits of Black characters in books and films, which he felt were dehumanizing, and he tried in his es says to reveal these persistent mythologies. He contradicted himself at times, and Zaborowska admits he was too slow in understanding the tremendous role that women had in his writ ing and his life. Zaborowska thinks he was fearful of alienating Blackmen. Zaborowska shows us repeatedly how hard he tried to avoid inflicting harm on others, how much he wanted to do the right James Baldwin with his lover Lucien Happarsberger in Lausanne, 1951.

Elaine Margolin is a freelance writer based in New York City.

November–December 2025

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