Skillfully weaving together emotion, memory, and geography, Corcoran creates a memorable narrative tapestry that delves into the dark complexities of love while exploring a gay man's hard-won path to self-acceptance. A lyrical and uncompromisingly honest memoir.
~Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Chipping away at the impossible damage that a mother caused to her son, and reflecting their impossible mother-son love, the memoir No Son of Mine is a masterpiece.Foreword Review Starred Review
~Foreword Reviews (starred)
An honest and gripping portrayal of the fraught and painful relationship between a mother and son.
~Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point and In the Gloaming
Set in West Virginia and New York City, No Son of Mine is a gorgeous, extraordinary memoir about the heartbreaking relationship between a queer son and the mother who disowned him, and about two young men falling in love and figuring out how to build their lives together. In poetic and stunning prose, Jonathan Corcoran writes perceptively, fiercely, and tenderly about what it means to be both estranged from and bound to a place and family, to feel both loved and rejected, and to grieve and to forgive. It's also one of the best memoirs I've read that shines a light on rural queerness, masculinity, and the complexities of economic class. I absolutely loved this book and I want everyone to read it.
~Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star
We know that gay men are threatened with death in a dozen nations, but Jon Corcoran's No Son of Mine unforgettably reminds us that some gay American's lives are threatened today, in our own country, by their own families. Jon Corcoran's memoir of a beloved son's twenty year cycle of rejection and grief is also the story of the conflicted mother who adored him, her youngest child and only son, but could not accept him. Every American should read this elegy about the politics of place and church, the loss of one home, and the triumphant forging of another.
~Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Night Watch
What if I told you this book will tear your heart out and then turn around and make you want it to happen all over again? There is an ecstatic vulnerability here woven in a language incandescent in its reach.
~Mesha Maren, author of Perpetual West and Sugar Run
Corcoran has built an urgent, affecting, and propulsive narrative that believes we can find safety in relationship and intimacy, even after tremendous harm. Trauma and hurt may never be erased from our psyches, but even as they encircle us, we can encircle one another. Read this book if you want to believe we can build survivable worlds.
~Leora Fridman, author of Static Palace and My Fault
Corcoran examines loss and love, estrangement and empathy, through the lens of his relationship with his mother.... In No Son of Mine, Corcoran cuts to the heart of familial estrangement, and his narrative will be achingly familiar to anyone who has experienced anything like it. When the people who are supposed to love us most in the world abandon and revile us, we cannot help but repeatedly cycle through grief and hope, empathy and ambivalence, forgiveness and remembering.
~Change Seven
A lyrical and uncompromisingly honest memoir.
~Kirkus Starred Review
Corcoran pieces together the fragments of his troubled childhood with intensity and memorable detail. ... Corcoran's memoir is intense and, at times, difficult to read. He makes it clear from the beginning that there will be no moment of reconciliation, no peace between him and his mother. His real journey is not about how much his mother made him suffer but how he creates an identity apart from her and overcomes the sense of life having cheated him. No Son of Mine is a deeply personal view of what it means to be a son, and when one has to stop being a son and become someone else — a husband, a friend, or even oneself.
~Southern Review of Books
Jonathan Corcoran's tour de force memoir of a loving Appalachian childhood suddenly turned family-nightmare when his mother disowns him upon learning he is gay A remarkable evocation of time and place in 21st century America.
~Carl Bernstein
Corcoran's candid memoir not only exposes the raw emotional wounds inflicted by familial rejection but also provides unparalleled insight into this particular form of trauma. Among the books I have encountered on this subject, few have articulated the complexities and devastating impact of parental abandonment with such clarity.... No Son of Mine is a powerful testament to the profound impact of parental abandonment on an individual's life, of what happens when the one who should love you above all else is the one who breaks your heart, and of trying to love someone who will not let you love them. It is a story of resilience and hope for those of us who have had to find our own way.
~Psychology Today
