Garrard Conley Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Memoirs

Conley is the author of Boy Erased. The book is a paperback that came out from Penguin in 2016 for the first time. It has since gone through further printings and there is a translation of the book into a dozen other languages and counting. It has also been made into a Hollywood major motion picture.

The novel was also put up for a prestigious chance at a Lamdba Literary Award. On top of its award nominations, this book was also featured in media such as Buzzfeed Books, O Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and more.

Conley is a creator as well as a producer of his own podcast, which is called UnErased, The podcast aims to explore America’s conversion therapy history. This is done through focusing on historical documents, interviews, as well as archive materials that are provided by the Washington, D.C. Mattachine Society.

Conversion therapy is actually something that is very important to this author. He was and is a survivor of this type of therapy. He is now a speaker and an activist and goes around the country giving lectures and talks at schools as well as other national venues. He is a believer in the concept and action of what is known as ‘radical compassion’.

He has written through a lot of his trauma and has been through a lot personally in this life. He went through different experienced growing up as a young man that was gay in the South. Not everyone is accommodating to that concept depending on where you are living. These days, Conley collaborates with other activists and people in the quest to end this type of therapy once and for all not only in America but abroad and across the entire world.

This author has received scholarships from a variety of places in addition to teaching writing classes and workshops in places such as Provincetown. He has been a memoir teacher for the Memoir Incubator GrubStreet program.

The author belongs to the PEN America Foundation. He also is part of the board for the Mattachine Society. He is a retired volunteer with the Peace Corps. He has been in Ukraine as an instructor of English as a Second Language and an educator on HIV and AIDS. He lives with his husband in New York.

You can find his work in a variety of places such as CNN, VICE, TIME, The New York Times, Them, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and more.

Boy Erased is a book written by Garrard Conley. The book was adapted into a 2018 full length feature film starring Nicole Kidman as well as Lucas Hedges. Just like the novel, the movie concerns the story of a young son to a Baptist pastor that has a crisis about what to do when it comes to his sexuality and eventually is forced to decide to go through conversion therapy.

When he was younger, Conley didn’t know what to do when it comes to his sexuality. He may have been a young man, but he was also the child of a father that was a Baptist pastor. When your whole life and your family is linked to the church and you live in the South, that can be a big deal.

Garrard’s father was deeply involved in church life in their small town in Arkansas and so was Garrard. He has a lot of conflicting feelings about his instincts for men, but it also feels strange having those feelings in a culture and a religion that may not be as welcoming to that as you would hope.

When he was in college at the age of 19 years old, Garrard was outed. His parents found out against his will and in that moment they sat him down to force him to make a decision that would change his life. He was given the choice to agree to go through conversion therapy as part of a church run program that would get rid of the homosexuality and make him straight or he would lose all of his way of life and his family and friends in the process.

They also mentioned that the god that he had relied on for so much of his life would also turn His back on Garrard in the process. The conversion therapy was the one that he chose, but in the end it would choose to be something more damaging than he ever imagined. Perhaps it would have been a smarter decision to turn the back on family or friends.

Or maybe his parents would have been wrong. No one would have left him after all. Or some would have and others would have found it in their hearts to have compassion for him. Even if everyone believed that it was wrong, some of them surely would have still talked to him and not made him a pariah. Forced to deal with the pressure of making a huge decision, Garrard goes through the therapy.

He thought that he would come out maybe as a different person. No one truly knows what it is like to go through this type of therapy unless they have been through it. The way that they say that it works is that he comes out rid of his gay urges and totally changed from his original inclinations. Not only is he not homosexual anymore, but he is straight and has made it all the way to the other side.

When it comes to journeys, this one is definitely one of the tougher ones out there. Garrard has been through something that many other youths have experienced. Conversion therapy is a brutal experience and this is fully relayed in his book, Boy Exposed.

Finding the strength to survive and move out of a life in shadow to try and hunt down who he is and find empathy, with his faith stronger than ever, this memoir is incredible. It’s a tale that goes over the meaning of family, community, faith and strength in the face of the horrific that goes on. Read this book to experience it for yourself and check out the movie too.