Ruin & Want, José Angel Araguz
Is selfhood constructed? And if so, by whom? Exploring queerness, race, body image, and family, Ruin & Want is a masterful meditation on otherness and identity. In a series of gripping, episodic prose pieces centered on an illicit relationship between a student and his high school English teacher, Araguz peels back the layers of his marginalized identity. By reflecting on his childhood into adulthood, Araguz grapples with finding a sense of self when early, predatory experiences have deeply affected his coming-of-age. In quixotic, deeply eviscerating lyric prose, Araguz delivers a troubling but bold memoir that handles this topic with courage while grieving what it costs survivors to reckon with harm’s aftermath. Yet in the midst of this struggle, we find many bittersweet and lingering gifts such as, “For the first time I saw myself as someone worth seeing,” that make this work necessary and unforgettable.
“Early in Ruin & Want, José Angel Araguz tells a story of the devil holding a rotting apple under the nose of their sleeping fiancé, saying ‘so that my history, what I am capable of, would enter her.’ It begs the question: what is desire without destruction? The same crumbling of ego that allows relationships to form can also be a trauma that distances us from each other, from ourselves. But doing more than recounting the ways desire and destruction coalesce within the heart and the hands, Araguz sits with the ruins of an abusive relationship with a teacher, of being a Latinx teenager in Corpus Christi, of misplaced and mismanaged desire in his adulthood not to dispense some wisdom, but to breathe it in, the rot, yes, but also the sweetness that comes from being with another.”
—B. Rivka Clifton, author of MOT and Agape
“Ruin & Want is no typical coming-of-age memoir. This debut of lyrical prose joins the deft beauty of José Angel Araguz’s poetic sensibility with the surprise of his quiet candor. In this book, the Devil speaks, the body floats impossibly in the air, and James Joyce becomes the literary guide of a toxic relationship between a 17-year-old boy and his 47-year-old, married English teacher. But this is not merely a story about abuse and survival, or desire and disillusionment. It is a complex investigation of the language that allows, perhaps even incites, the romanticization of interpersonal trauma. It is an interrogation of the narrow confines of heteronormative masculinity. It is a heart-wrenching meditation on the brutal intimacies we hide with others. ‘I share all this for the sake of transparency,’ Araguz tells us at the beginning of his query, ‘I write these words so one day I can hold them to the light and begin to see what is behind them.’ For all the darkness revealed in this work, the ultimate effect is dazzling.”
—Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of The Riots and Desire Museum
“Searching, heart-wrenching, and profoundly resonant are the pages of Ruin & Want. In this powerful book, we learn about a young man trying to define who he is and who he wants to be, navigating relationships and Chicano upbringing, confronting toxic masculinity and the traumas of sexual violence. José Angel Araguz’s moving prose and refreshingly honest voice brings us to the heart of what it means to reexamine the past in order to find oneself, in order to know oneself anew. This book is a gift.”
—Marcos Gonsalez, author of Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land