In the tradition of James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Michael Thomas pens a poignant and powerful, always captivating and oftentimes heartbreaking story of the Black male experience amidst America’s relentless struggle with race and class. His memoir – “The Broken King” – focuses on the lives of five men: his absentee father, a street philosopher and avid Red Sox fan, his estranged older brother, his two sons growing up in Brooklyn and his own struggles with being raped as a child and drifting in and out of sanity.
At the heart of “The Broken King” is the tale of Thomas’ own breakdown, partially a product of his inherited family history and his lived experiences growing up Black in the suburbs of Boston in the 70s in an environment Thomas describes as “commuting, lying and living” with a broken family in a shattered world.
“Outside the house was Boston in the 70s,” he writes. “Very few places were safe. Inside was unsafe, or at least unsure. Every mechanical system was failing leaks, broken latches, cracked panes, and peeling paint. It was a relief to come home at night and see the lights turn on.”
“My father was a gentle man,” Thomas writes. “At least that’s what I told myself. He was a drunk, a liar, a deadbeat, a cheat, and I’d seen him choke my mother and drag her out of the house. He was also distant and cryptic – not cold, just away, some place of abstraction. I watched him drink, smoke and screw – all without commentary or explication. Being with my father was both freeing and burdensome.”
“My mother’s rage, sometimes alcoholic, sometimes because she was so scared and alone,” Thomas writes. “In part, just because life was so fricking hard, was mundane and terrifying. And, she was so sad.”
That sadness and addiction became a central part of his story. A rape survivor, he self-medicated with alcohol to quell his demons. A loving father, he describes himself as both distant and devoted, struggling not to repeat the sins of his father and pass on his own fear and failings.
“I feared my son’s fear,” he writes, “I’d never been able to allow myself to truly be scared. I didn’t know what to do with it. I wanted him to know he was better and be better than it. This must’ve been horrible for him. The more I thought of my failings, the more I demanded that he have none.”
Thomas, who arrived on the literary scene in 2006 with his breakout novel Man Gone Down, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year, vividly describes his struggles with alcohol.
“The vexing paradox of drunkenness is that alcohol helps to filter out the more extreme frequencies. Although I knew they were there, somewhere in the mix, the illusion – that there existed only a midrange — was essential. No shrill highs of dolorous lows, just a middling buzz. I could, to a certain extent, meet the dulled head of the world straight on,” writes the author who’s been sober for three decades and is a professor of English at Hunter College in Brooklyn.
When asked what he hopes readers of The Broken King glean from its pages, Thomas says: “I don’t have a message—perhaps only modeling. I have faith that I’ve survived with something in me that might be intact and good. I can act from faith, and if I do so in error, I try to make amends and I try again.”
Thomas is currently working on a book about his mother, which he says will include “her migration, her labor, her language, her music, and her love.”
“Sometimes all I can do is survive,” Thomas writes in the last paragraph of his memoir. I suspect I will always be sad and alone, even in the best of times. “But this is the pain of being whole, not broken. This is the pain of the now. So, stay, stay, stay with me here, and know that in this moment, again. I am not afraid.”
