Punch Me Up to the Gods

Summary

Brian Broome opens his memoir on a Pittsburgh bus watching a father teach his young son what it means to be a Black man in America: be hard, be strong, be invisible in the ways that make you a target, be visible in the ways that demand respect. Broome uses this observed moment to enter his own story: a Black boy in Warren, Ohio who was soft when his world demanded hard, gay when his world demanded straight, gentle when his world demanded toughness, and who spent decades trying to drink and drug his way into a version of himself that would fit.

Punch Me Up to the Gods is formally inventive in a way rare for debut memoir: Broome uses the bus observation as a recurring structural device, returning to the father and son throughout the book as a way of measuring his own distance from and proximity to the masculinity being taught in front of him. Each return to the bus is a different kind of reckoning, and the structure works as well as it sounds in description.

The book covers Broome’s childhood in Ohio, his young adult life in Pittsburgh, and his slow, costly journey toward sobriety and something like self-knowledge. It is funny and devastating in turns, and the two modes are never far from each other, which is one of the things that makes the voice so distinctive.

Character Arcs and Development

The young Brian is a child who knows he is wrong for his world and cannot understand why. His parents, particularly his father, wanted a different kind of son, and the weight of that disappointment is rendered with painful specificity. He is also a child of real intelligence and sensitivity who found, over time, that those qualities were not assets in the worlds he had to navigate.

The adult Brian who narrates the book is someone who has survived things he was not supposed to survive and is trying to understand both the survival and the cost. The memoir’s most moving sections are those in which present-day Broome looks back at his younger self with something approaching compassion, which is an achievement: self-compassion is genuinely difficult, and the memoir tracks the difficulty honestly.

Pacing

The book moves between the Pittsburgh bus, Broome’s childhood in Ohio, and his adult years, and the non-linear structure does not disorient because each section is clearly located and the voice is distinctive enough to orient the reader regardless of the timeline. The writing is dense enough that the 256 pages feel longer in the most pleasurable sense: there is more in each page than the page count suggests.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The book’s central subject is the impossible position of a Black gay man in American culture: doubly outside the normative, negotiating demands that cannot all be met simultaneously. Broome does not write this as complaint; he writes it as observation, and the clarity of the observation is more damning than complaint would be. The codes of Black masculinity he was taught to navigate were real codes, with real consequences for failure, and they were also incompatible with who he is.

The addiction sections are the most raw in the book. Broome does not romanticize his drinking or his drug use; he describes it with the particularity of someone who has spent long hours trying to understand why he did what he did, and the understanding he arrives at is not comfortable but is entirely honest.

Style and Voice

Broome’s voice is one of the most distinctive in recent American memoir: sardonic and tender in the same sentence, precise and vulnerable in the same paragraph. He uses humor as a survival mechanism that he is also aware of using as a survival mechanism, which gives the funny passages an edge that straight comedy would not have. The prose is literary without being inaccessible, demanding without being opaque.

Verdict

Punch Me Up to the Gods is a major debut from a writer of significant gifts. It does what the best memoir does: it makes a specific life feel universal without losing the specificity that makes it worth reading. It is about race and queerness and addiction and masculinity, and it is also just about the particular person who lived this life and is now trying to understand it.

Five stars: a necessary and lasting contribution to American memoir.

What is the structural device of the bus in this memoir?

The memoir opens with Broome observing a father teaching his young son codes of Black masculinity on a Pittsburgh bus, and returns to this scene several times throughout the book as a structural anchor. Each return offers a different angle on the same observation, accumulating meaning as Broome’s own history is revealed. It is an inventive formal choice that gives the memoir a distinctive architecture.

Does the book end with recovery?

The book moves toward recovery but does not present it as complete or clean. Broome is honest about the ongoing nature of sobriety and self-understanding. The ending has the quality of a beginning: something has changed, and the change is real, but the work is not finished and he does not pretend it is.

How does the book handle sexuality?

Directly and without apology. Broome is openly gay and the memoir engages with what it meant to be gay and Black in the specific communities and time periods he inhabits. The intersections of race, sexuality, and masculinity are the book’s central preoccupation, and Broome handles them with a clarity that comes from having spent a long time thinking about their interaction in his own life.

Is this Broome’s first book?

Yes, Punch Me Up to the Gods is his debut book. He had written for various publications before its publication. The Carnegie Medal, which it won in 2022, is typically given to established authors with significant bodies of work, making the award for a debut particularly notable and indicative of how highly the book was regarded.

What does the title mean?

The title comes from a story Broome tells about his father’s aspirations for him: the father wanted him punched into a harder, more conventionally masculine version of himself, wanted the world to toughen him up toward some ideal of Black manhood. The phrase captures both the violence implicit in that project and the love behind it, which is the book’s central complication.

Is this book similar to Heavy by Kiese Laymon?

Both are memoirs by Black men from the American Midwest grappling with race, masculinity, family, and the body, and both are formally inventive and literary in their approach. They make excellent companion texts. Laymon uses direct address and Broome uses the recurring bus scene, but both employ formal innovation to achieve what conventional memoir structure could not. Readers who love one will almost certainly love the other.

How long is the book and how does it read?

At 256 pages it is relatively short, but reads slowly because of the density of the prose and the weight of the subject matter. Most readers report it taking longer than the page count suggests, which is a sign of how much is in each page. The humor makes it less relentlessly difficult than the summary might suggest.

Who should read this book?

Anyone interested in memoir about race, queerness, addiction, or masculinity should read it. It is particularly valuable as a text about intersectionality: about what it means to inhabit multiple marginalized identities simultaneously and to navigate the specific contradictions that intersection creates. Teachers of American literature and creative nonfiction have found it an exceptional teaching text.