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A Decolonial Memoir
by Shayla Lawson
Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.
In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.
Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year's Eve in Mexico City, Lawson's travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.
Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.
"Packed with lyrical lines, genuine insight, and ebullient confessions, Lawson's latest nonfiction book sparkles with vulnerability, sincerity, and poetry… Lawson is a gifted chronicler not only of their own personal revolution, but also of the power structures that affect their place in the world. A stunning essay collection about travel, mortality, and liberation."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"No matter the setting, Lawson's sentences astonish, and while the volume lacks a firm narrative through line, the author's commitment to unsentimental self-examination is inspiring enough to sustain readers' attention. The final product is both vivid and galvanizing." —Publishers Weekly
"If you haven't encountered Shayla Lawson's work yet, consider this your formal invitation. How to Live Free in a Dangerous World is a jet-setting memoir that explores race, gender, disability, and love through an unbelievable itinerary: Venice, Zimbabwe, Mexico City, Portugal, Tokyo, Bermuda—the list goes on. Lawson writes with fierceness, wisdom, and vulnerability in a voice that can't help but captivate. Treat yourself."
—Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"
"Phenomenal. Shayla Lawson's How to Live Free in a Dangerous World is luminously intimate. It is a memoir that opens into the world, with brilliance, courage, and elegant prose. Lawson is at once marvelously and unapologetically Black, incisive, and vulnerable. They are an unflinching observer of the world who takes us on a journey that is both wide and deep. This is a book to read, read again, and remember."
—Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America
"Some writers have the gift of talent. Some writers' talent is a gift to others, namely the reader. Then there are those writers who fall into both categories. Shayla Lawson is one such author. Thought provoking, raw, honest, funny, moving. This book is a treasure. Shayla is a marvel. I'm so grateful for what they and the book have given us."
—Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can't Touch My Hair
"How To Live Free in a Dangerous World explores many places – varied cultures, perspectives, life stages, individual differences – and how we navigate these intersecting landscapes. Beautiful, moving, and relentlessly insightful."
—Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl
This information about How to Live Free in a Dangerous World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Shayla Lawson is the author of This Is Major, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a LAMBDA Literary Award, as well as two poetry collections. Lawson has written for New York magazine, Salon, ESPN, and Paper, and earned fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. They reside in Lexington, Kentucky. They've "lived" everywhere.
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