Fiction gets a lot of love in queer lit spaces and rightfully so. But sometimes the most powerful queer stories are the ones that actually happened. These three memoirs wrecked me, delighted me, and made me think about my own life in ways I was not expecting. They are very different books about very different lives and I loved every single one of them.
Burn the Place: A Memoir by Iliana Regan
This one hits me somewhere personal and I want to be upfront about that. Iliana Regan is a couple of years younger than me and she grew up about twenty minutes from where I did. Reading this memoir felt like someone had reached into my chest and pulled out a specific kind of homesickness I did not know I was carrying. There are small details scattered throughout that made me feel home happy and heartbroken in the same breath.
But even if you have no connection to the place or the era, this book will get you. Regan is a celebrated chef and her love of food drips from every page. The prose is lush and sensory and completely unlike anything else I have read in the memoir space. Her story of growing up queer, struggling with addiction, and finding herself through food and land and family is devastating and gorgeous in equal measure. This is one of those books that stays with you.
I came to this book with a specific kind of curiosity. As a former youth pastor I have always been drawn to stories about how people reconcile a faith that told them their sexuality was wrong with the fullness of who they actually are. Hijab Butch Blues does that in the most extraordinary way. Lamya H is a queer Muslim immigrant who uses stories from the Quran to reframe and reclaim her own identity, reading her life through the lens of the figures she grew up loving. It is a book about faith and queerness and immigration and belonging and it is written with such intelligence and tenderness that it will rearrange something in you regardless of your own religious background. I could not put it down.
How Y’all Doing? Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived by Leslie Jordan
Leslie Jordan was one of the most magnificent humans to ever walk this earth and I will die on that hill. This collection of essays about his life growing up in Tennessee, coming out, finding his faith, and stumbling into one of the most beloved careers in television is exactly what you would expect from him if you ever watched even thirty seconds of his Instagram videos during the pandemic. It is funny and warm and completely disarming. His stories of coming out and his connection to his family are so endearing and so solid that you finish this book feeling like you just spent an afternoon with your most entertaining relative. We lost him far too soon and this book is a gift.
Three very different lives, three extraordinary queer voices. Drop a comment and tell me which one you are picking up first. And if you have a queer memoir that absolutely wrecked you in the best way, come tell us about it in the Discord.
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Year of Queer Lit 
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