Another Word for Love: A Memoir by Carvell Wallace (5/14/24)

A transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing.

We are born, and life breaks us. We spend the rest of our lives trying to put ourselves back together. “To return, to be made whole again. This is another word for love,” writes Carvell Wallace. In Another Word for Love, Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America. What follows could be another narrow story of pain and survival, recounting hurt and centering suffering. But this is not that kind of memoir.

Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and what frames it—making sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.

With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness—not to mention an unrivaled, thrilling, and stylistic storytelling verve—Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, for love itself. This extraordinary book is a radical meditation on healing, told through lenses of justice, sex, family, and death. It could be called a theory of life itself.