When Michael Thomas sold his debut novel, Man Gone Down, in 2005 for an advance that covered “almost a month of bills”, he clocked that he’d have to “sell a book every few weeks for some time to come” to make a living. The novel became a Dublin Literary Award-winning sensation.
But while Grove Press gave him “a room in the house of Beckett”, his profit on it was absurd: a tenure line conjured out of thin air after years of adjunct labour, a name more searchable by the psych ward’s docs.
Thomas’s artfully relentless memoir The Broken King, his first book in 21 years, lays bare how he got there after a harrowing youth and the exhausting vigilance of masking his agony. He chronicles his brother’s dissolution, shivering at their “bond in mayhem” as he raises three biracial children in Brooklyn. The book dwells in pressure yet gasps for beauty.
Having grown up a curious, hurt, neurodivergent child, Thomas recognises how institutions “racialised my strangeness” while refusing the clarity of a diagnosis: “I was autistic. Autism was white.” Such “excavation” is risky and consequential. Marginalised people who identify as disabled must contend with the profound stigma of disability’s historical use as a patriarchal, colonial tool for declaring Black unfitness and justifying medical racism.
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The Broken King contributes to a long legacy of Black disabled authorship from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman to Lois Curtis, Audre Lorde and Sami Schalk. Thomas focuses primarily on men’s pain, questing more to repair the broken king than to unking the broken world.
Thomas’s title comes from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem he memorised at age 12 and cherishes for the ways it “explained, countered or even incorporated” his dyslexia (“the word that moves”) and OCD (“the search for the one that is perfectly still”). In 1920, a reviewer of Eliot’s The Waste Land asked of the poem’s dire visions, “why write verse about it; why not commit suicide?”
Even a century later, let’s all yell down to hell to remind that guy, as Thomas says, that “life is just so f**king hard”.
While he tells us that suicidal ideation ceaselessly “seduces and demands that I go,” Thomas offers readers an incantatory guide to the rhythms of remaining: “I stay for a moment and then another.” Stay longer, please.
Greg Londe lectures in English at Cornell University
