BONES WORTH BREAKING

A memoir of death, addiction, family history, and recovery.

“Drugs were what I knew before the mission, and drugs were what I went back to,” writes Martinez of an interlude that found him proselytizing for his Mormon faith in Brazil. The drugs are constant throughout this often repetitive memoir, which has an MFA workshop feel to it, if grittier than most: There’s heroin, cocaine, and every other sort of mind-altering substance, consumed against a bookish backdrop that finds the author writing while using: “My dreams had merged—my love of books and my need for drugs—or the dream and nightmare were fighting one another.” His younger brother was less fortunate: Though intelligent and observant, and though, as Martinez writes, “we were more stupid than dangerous,” he wound up being ground down by a legal system that disproportionately punishes people of color. On that note, Martinez teases out an identity with many strands: bloodlines from Africa, Brazil, Indigenous South America, and Europe, with a history that implicates “my Portuguese ancestors…[who] forced my African ancestors into boats and brought them across the Atlantic.” Later, the author writes, “What I know is that I am an other in a nation and world that demands categorization.” Martinez’s prose comes to life when he honors his late brother, and he is also insightful on his break with the church, which he condemns as being characterized by “racism, obsession about sin, right-wing politics, bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia.” His views of academia are scarcely less excoriating, as he rightly questions why the faculty of his school is overwhelmingly white while only a little more than a third of the students are. It all adds up to a mixed bag, and though it’s not The Basketball Diaries, it has its moments.

An adequate exercise in remembrance, punctuated by memorable moments of resistance and righteous anger.