This Must Be The Place, the new memoir by Sean H. Doyle—published May 1—features the most gratuitous drug use of any book I’ve ever read, and it’s packed with violence, grief, and generally horrible things. In fact, if you were to take out the drugs and the violence and the sadness, you’d really have nothing. But none of it reads in a way that’s designed to offend the reader. Instead, Doyle seems intent on making himself face his ugliest moments, his lowest points. A dog rubbing his own nose in the many messes he’s made on so many carpets.

My father keeps beer in the fridge for me. He doesn’t drink, really, and I don’t live with him anymore, but I think he likes that I come over and, when I do, he can say, “There’s beer.”

“Writing in general by black men from the south is very slim. To the degree that it exists—it’s women.” It’s a Thursday in early October and we’re at The Lamb’s Club in Midtown, a high-priced food depository where hundred-dollar business lunches have become daily rituals. Amid the clatter of silverware and conversation, New York Times columnist Charles Blow opens up about his new memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones—a stirring testimony of growing up in Louisiana and discovering what it means to be a man.