Bad Boy: A Memoir

“Each of us is born with a history already in place. There are physical aspects that make us brown-eyed or blue-eyed, that make us tall or not so tall, or give us curly or straight hair. Our parents might be rich or poor. We could be born in a crowded, bustling city or in a rural area. While we live our own individual lives, what has gone before us, our history, always has some effect on us.”

Throughout Bad Boy, Myers struggles to strike a balance between his desire to belong to a community and his fear of being defined by that community. As a teenager in particular, Myers hopes to use his writing and reading as a way to distance himself from his blackness; although he appreciates many things about the black community, he sees it as incompatible with the kind of intellectual life he wants to lead, and is afraid of becoming an anonymous part of the “army of black laborers sweating and grunting their way through midtown New York” (122). Eventually, however, Myers comes to realize that his basic assumptions were misguided; after reading works by writers like James Baldwin, Myers realizes that he can exist both as a writer and as a black man. This in turn makes it easier for him to accept something that he fought against as a teenager—namely, that while his race doesn’t entirely define him, being born black in America does come with a particular “history” that has shaped him.

“Years later, when I had learned to use words better, I lost my ability to speak so freely with Mama.”

As a young boy, Myers is very close to his mother, who not only sparks his interest in language, but also talks to him about things that, Myers believes, she didn’t discuss with others.