No Son of Mine: A Memoir

Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond.  When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he formed new bonds beyond bloodlines, and met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, the cycle finally ended when he received the news that his mother had died.   In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. A biography nestled inside a memoir, No Son of Mine is Corcoran's story of alienation and his attempts to understand his mother's choice to cut him out of her life. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.

Table of Contents:
February 2020 Part 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Part 2 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Part 3 16 17 18 19 20 Acknowledgments Biography Appalachian Futures: series description March 2020 Front Matter

About the Author :

Jonathan Corcoran is the author of The Rope Swing: Stories, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and a Lambda Literary Awards finalist. His essays and stories have been anthologized in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia and Best Gay Stories. Corcoran teaches writing at New York University and resides in Brooklyn, New York.

A lyrical and uncompromisingly honest memoir.

An honest and gripping portrayal of the fraught and painful relationship between a mother and son.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Corcoran's debut memoir, No Son of Mine, is an honest and emotional journey through loss and grief. . . . He shows how unresolved trauma impacts families and the harm it causes, generationally. . . . While his relationship with his mother doesn't have a happily ever after, readers see that Corcoran's life does. A life filled with hope, love, family, and heritage.

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.

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.

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.

The beauty, tragedy, and strength of this memoir are nourished by its origins in a liminal space--during lockdown when time stopped and yet didn't. Corcoran opens in this moment and uses it to explore the limits of that liminality in his own life, how his husband's refrain to breathe would echo backwards to his childself, how a young boy taught that "love was violent" retains his anger as a man. That healing permeability is such a strong pulse in the text that the reader can't help but be pulled into the restorative timelessness. Corcoran conjures a time-fluid world as if in a spell, and the atoms of that world are made of love, often the love between people trapped in their own stories, people trying to survive the context imposed on them by others. . . . No Son of Mine presents a timely story every American should read right now, one of a rural queer Appalachian who, like many before and after him, stands before two seemingly incongruous realities and asks himself, To which do I belong? . . . . I hope he knows by now, as sure as I do, that he belongs to us all.

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.

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.

2024 Foreword Reviews INDIES Award Winner - Bronze Medal in LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction

2024 Weatherford Award Finalist - Non-Fiction