Boy Erased: A Memoir

4.1 | 2,751 ratings

Price: 15.75

Last update: 01-07-2025

About this item

The New York Times best-selling memoir about identity, love, and understanding. Now a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, directed by Joel Edgerton.

"Every sentence of the story will stir your soul" (O Magazine).

The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality.

When Garrard was a 19-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized 12-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin. Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.

By confronting his buried past and the burden of a life lived in shadow, Garrard traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. At times heart-breaking, at times triumphant, this memoir is a testament to love that survives despite all odds.

Daniel L. Driewer

Powerful, painful......

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2018

I'm gay. It took me 5 decades to accept it. In the process, I lost my family. This book was too real for me at times - what might have been my fate had I traveled a different path than I did. It tells the tale of a young gay man when he was 17-19 years old. The author hails from the Ozarks. Bible Belt area. His family is very religious, fundamentalist Baptists. The father, owned and ran a generational cotton gin business, then had an interest in a car dealership, where the boy worked, until he hears a calling from God. His dad decides to become an ordained Baptist minister. What I'm trying to say is conditions, even in the early 2000, were not optimal for this gay son/young man.

Garrard, the author, has a girlfriend in HS. She's from his church and everyone approves including the parents. Being gay (and I know this from experience) the last thing he wants is an intimate relationship with her. When the girl starts to make the moves sexually........he backs off and ends it. This is right before college, which the parents are paying for.

We're told that the Garrard was same sex attracted from an early age with his first "crush" being a male teacher. As many gay boys/men seem to be, he longs to be normal, straight or "not gay", not different. At college he tried to shy away from gay related activities but deep down he has desires, fantasies, etc. He's a normal gay young man. Garrard befriends another boy who takes him to a Pentecostal church. The relationship is just budding when this "friend" literally rapes him. No consensual sex, no foreplay - rape. To make it all the worse, the rapist "outs" him to his parents. Garrand is traumatized doubly over, his parents beside themselves given their beliefs to learn their only child, their son is gay.

The rest for the book covers "Love in Action" an offshoot of "Exodus International" a now debunked and disreputable organization and their theory(s) that gays can be "cured" of their same sex attraction. No F-ing way can this be done. I know from personal experience. You are what you are for whatever reason: DNA, life experiences, chromosomes, mothers pregnancy, whatever. My belief is God made me this way for whatever reason. Why? I hope to be able to ask Him some day.

The strain on this young mans life was enormous. His father threatened to yank his only child's/son's college and home away from him. Everything for this young man was at stake. I won't go into details of the therapy.....but it's depressing and, from my perspective, outrageous among other things I could say.

Bottom line, no happy ending but there was some light at the end of the tunnel. When pushed against the wall at one therapy session Garrard has had enough, starts walking and never looks back. Gets his phone and calls his one and only ally in this sordid story: his mother. Garrard finishes college. Semi reconciles with his family......dad? Not so much. There's still love there however. What is finished right now or at the time of the book's writing anyway is that Garrard is done with God, done with religion - any religion.

I'm glad I read the book. I learned quite about about one man's struggle with being outed and his own personal battle complete with reparative therapy. I was also glad to be finished with it because it hit too close to home for me - made me anxious, upset and depressed.

Bottom line, I'd recommend this book highly, especially if your gay, know someone who is or support gay rights and the fact that we are just people, who happen, through no fault of our own, to be attracted to the same sex.

Jeremy Wayne

Good read, great movie

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2023

I randomly found the movie on Netflix and loved it. This is a good book, but a very rare case where the film was better. I enjoyed the tension between Jay and the narrator that wasn’t present in the movie, and the assault scene in the book was very powerful, but there was a little too much scripture and church in the book. As a southern Baptist, liberty university gay…maybe it just hit too close to home. It is a little niche in that respect. But definitely watch the movie!

SCT

Captivating and Inspiring!

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2019

Some other reviewers here seem to have disliked the compassionate tone the book was written in. I respectfully disagree with those reviewers.

Let me explain. As a survivor of conversion therapy myself, I very much relate to the tone that Gerard Connolly uses in the book when discussing the damaging and horrifying tactics used. While he discusses the methods in detail and does not try to sugarcoat any of the tactics used by LIA, he takes a much more compassionate tone when discussing the religious figures and therapists involved. I believe the reason he does not demonize the people as much as the therapy itself is because in a small way, they are victims of a bigoted ideology themselves. While in no way am I suggesting that they do not bear responsibility for the psychological damage they have caused to countless people, one must also understand that many therapists and religious figures who support conversion therapy truly believe they are doing a very good thing. When I think about my conversion therapist, I still feel a reflexive anger towards him for the damage he caused to my psyche, but as times passes and I gain more perspective, I feel much more sympathy for him more than I feel anger. The reason is because although he is wholly misguided and needs to stop doing what he's doing right now, he is not actually a bad person. He is actually a kind but very misguided person who thinks he is doing a good thing who doesn't want to entertain the though that he has devoted his life to a destructive therapy. In much the same way, I believe, Gerard Conley feels the same way regarding his therapists and religious leaders who are all for the most part good people making large mistakes due to believing in a warped ideology, not of their own creation. While all conversion therapists must be pressured to stop their pseudo-scientific efforts and take full responsibility for the damage they've caused, it is far more important for conversion therapy survivors to demonize conversion therapy itself and end it once and for all, than to waste time harboring anger against the people who've wronged us in the past.

Also, the book is extremely well written and captivating from beginning to end!!

F. R. Eggers

Unnecessarily long

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2024

The content directly relating to the author's experience with his struggles with being gay, his attempts to change, and the organization selected to help him change his sexuality, could have been written in a book less than 1/4 as long. Most of the content was irrelevant to that, including his comments about the position of his mother's hands on the steering wheel, her mascara, his father's occupations before becoming a preacher, and his father's ordination into the ministry, etc. etc. On the other hand, some readers enjoy reading oral pictures of scenery, people's clothing, etc., and might not be put off by those parts of the book.

The RELEVANT material was very good and worth reading, but that was only a small part of the book. Readers who are interested only in the author's feelings about being gay, his attempts to change, and the "ex-gay" ministry which was supposed to enable him change, may choose to skip over much of the 340 page book.

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