Book Review: Boy Erased, a Memoir by Garrard Conley

This was not a book I picked to read, as I’m not interested in reading about anything as grotesque as conversion therapy. It was selected by my book club.

It’s a story about a gay son of a Baptist minister who got outed to his parents. They placed him in a conversion therapy camp to “cure” him, and things didn’t go well for the young man.

Although the prose is extremely well written, I found the pacing and content numbingly boring. What I did find interesting was the total Christian brainwashing that the author had suffered as a young man. I find it both horrifying and amazing that, in this age of science, people still take the bible literally. Boy Erased, in my opinion, is a book of sadness. A story of people who rebuff nature to pursue a myth.

This book reinforced every negative stereotype I have of organized religion and modern-day Christians.