Henry’s Reviews > Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man > Status Update

From the moment the testosterone kicked in, nearly everyone around me was invested in educating me in how to ape the strong-and-silent stereotype of the man whose reign was "over"—a socialization that involved relentless policing by strangers and friends alike, and across gender, geographic, and socioeconomic

“I felt all the absences my male body created too: the cool distance of friends in tough moments, stemming to some degree from the self-conscious way I held myself apart from women especially, so concerned with being perceived as a threat that I’d become a ghost instead.”

"Men don't hug," my uncle told me, extending his hand on a warm day a few years before. It was offered kindly, my new life a stream of unsolicited advice, a guide to the construction of a passable masculinity. He wasn't wrong. Jess was often the only person who touched me… I knew what it was like to be near-mad with that sort of need.

“This book is an attempt to pull apart those strands. It also became, as I wrote it, a kind of personal insurance, a way to track and shape my own becoming in a culture where so many men are poisonous. I too come from a long line of poisonous men.”

Those last lines about being poisonous are incredibly powerful

“It seemed to me that being in crisis was a natural reaction to being a man”