BOOK REVIEW: "Baldwin: A Love Story"

WHEW.

A marathon, not a sprint.

BALDWIN: A LOVE STORY is a tremendous feat of biography, meticulously researched, exhaustive, sometimes demanding.

I appreciate that Nicholas Boggs doesn’t flatten Baldwin into some kind of literary saint; instead he presents a brilliant, charismatic, difficult man, shaped by contradictions and by the racism and homophobia he endured, but also animated by a fierce capacity for love and generosity of spirit.

Structurally, the biography is framed through Baldwin’s intimate relationships, and it’s compelling how those relationships entangle with his identity and the evolution of his work.

Baldwin wrote powerfully about being Black in America, yet spent much of his life abroad — Paris, of course, and Istanbul (a detail I hadn’t known) — often finding he could only work on his books from a distance. Boggs shows just how hard-won each book was — how every project came with its own set of struggles, pressures, and expectations. Along the way, Baldwin emerges as a stubbornly persevering writer and an immensely devoted, if imperfect, friend and lover.