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Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays Hardcover – February 18, 2020

by R. Eric Thomas (Author)

4.4 1,092 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News,” a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way.

“Pop culture–obsessed, Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny . . . [R. Eric Thomas] is one of my favorite writers.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, Entertainment Weekly

FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TEEN VOGUE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Marie Claire • Men’s Health

R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went—whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city—he found himself on the outside looking in.

In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an “other” through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what “normal” means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story.

Here for It will resonate deeply and joyfully with everyone who has ever felt pushed to the margins, struggled with self-acceptance, or wished to shine more brightly in a dark world. Stay here for it—the future may surprise you.

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When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.
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The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste.
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She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”
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From the Publisher

memoirs;journey;education;autobiographies;inspirational books;funny books;lgbt books;humor;essays

Editorial Reviews

Review

“If you’re yearning for that laugh-out-loud on the subway, ‘damn-I-left-my-book-at-home’ kind of read, look no further than R. Eric Thomas’s Here for It.”—InStyle

“A quirky, funny, and deep meditation on being black and queer in America.”—Interview

“This book was a lovely gift of hope and hysterical wit that kept me warm during the apocalypse. I laughed. I cried. I wish I would have written it myself.”—Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of You Are Here and Furiously Happy

“Here for It is Thomas at his finest: funny, clever, thoughtful, and compelling. I’m glad the world will not only get to experience more of Thomas’s talent, but another much-needed story from another gay Black man in America.”—Michael Arceneaux, New York Times bestselling author of I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé

“A laugh-out-loud memoir that is strongly recommended for everyone.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“With humor, candor, and some self-deprecation, Thomas, a playwright and Elle columnist, delivers a debut essay collection that explores his search for self, love, and stable employment. . . . Whether dealing with love, breakups, or other setbacks, Thomas is an affable narrator with a penchant for pop culture, funny quips, and charming humility.”—Publishers Weekly

“Every book says on the jacket that it is a ‘razor-sharp tour de force,’ but this one actually is a razor-sharp tour de force, with an enormous heart to boot. Please give yourself the gift of reading this book.”—Alexandra Petri, Washington Post columnist

“Here For It is a blockbuster and R. Eric Thomas is a visionary. This collection moved me from laughter to tears and back to laughter again in the span of a single page.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things

“By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, intensely personal and impeccably of-the-moment, Here for It is exactly what we need in 2020. No one writes quite like R. Eric Thomas, and his memoir proves it.”—David Litt, New York Times bestselling author of Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years

“Hilarious, revelatory, hopeful, incisive—Here for It feels like splitting dessert with your funniest friend, if that friend was also your smartest professor and a devastatingly sharp pop culture historian.”—Casey McQuiston, New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue

“If I were stocking a time capsule to show future generations how it felt to be alive at this exact moment in American culture, this is the book I’d toss in first. Readers of all stripes will relate to Thomas’s hilarious, touching observations on love, success, and identity.”—Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink

About the Author

R. Eric Thomas is a bestselling author, playwright, and screenwriter. His books include Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which was featured as a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick on NBC’s Today, and Reclaiming Her Time: The Power of Maxine Waters, co-authored with Helena Andrews-Dyer. For four years, he wrote “Eric Reads the News,” a wildly popular daily humor column covering pop culture and politics for Elle online. Eric is the winner of the Barrymore Award for Best New Play and the Dramatist Guild Lanford Wilson Award, and was a finalist for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. He has written for the Peabody Award–winning streaming series Dickinson and Better Things on FX. Off the page, Eric is also the long-running host of The Moth StorySlams in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and has been heard multiple times on The Moth Radio Hour, NPR’s All Things Considered, and It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders. He lives in Maryland with his extraordinary husband, the Reverend David Norse Thomas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Audacity

I am awake because everything is hilarious. And also terrifying. And also embarrassing.

Don’t pick up the phone, I tell myself as I lie in bed on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, 2016. Go to sleep, my brain hisses, as I slip my hand out from beneath the sheet and unlock my phone. I open the Notes app and my bedroom is suddenly illuminated by garish, gray-blue light, like I’m in a reboot of Poltergeist. Well, I think to myself, it’s not like I have a choice now. I hitch myself up in bed and start to type. There is a joke emergency.

I don’t realize it at the time, but I am entering a season of sleepless nights. It’s the middle of July and I am three weeks into my new job as a person who contributes to this great democracy by making fun of politics online for money. It’s immensely enjoyable but it does have the strange side effect of forcing me to know more about what’s happening in the world, particularly in the political world, and as I said, that’s hilarious and terrifying and deeply embarrassing. So, perfect for the internet. I’ve never been a particularly internet-y person. I like a good meme like the rest of the youths, but I’m never on the cutting edge of internet culture. Though I’ve had a couple of lackluster blogs, I’ve never been a blogger. I read television recaps on the legendary site Television Without Pity for years but never commented or engaged in any meaningful way beyond wishing that they’d miraculously email me and ask me to join the team. I must admit I know what Tumblr is but every time I think I know how to search for something on it I am proven wrong. I am a consumer on the internet, a regular, a normal. And, suddenly, recently, a viral creator. Clearly, the internet is broken.

Four weeks earlier, I’d come across a photo of President Obama, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto grinning as they strode down a red-carpeted walkway in bespoke suits. I was immediately deeply shewk. So I told the internet about it. I fired up my aging computer, posted the shot on Facebook, and wrote, “Whoever took this photo deserves a GD Pulitzer Prize. We may be two minutes from doomsday but thank the Lord we still live in a universe where three world leaders can strut into a room like they’re the new interracial male cast of Sex and the City. Like I have ALREADY pre-purchased tickets to this film. Out here in these streets looking like Career Day Ken. Looking like Destiny’s DILF. Looking like the Alternate Universe version of our Current Political Universe. Looking like Tom Ford presents The Avengers.” It went on like that for a while. As I said, I was deeply shewk.

At this time, I had about 1,500 Facebook friends, almost exclusively people I’d actually met. I had, on occasion, posted something funny online that friends shared with their friends who shared with their friends, eventually giving whatever I’d written a temporary social lift. That’s how the internet works, and the first time it happened on Facebook—when my blog post about how expensive Beyoncé concert tickets were got 100,000 page views—I thought I was famous. The internet will quickly remind you that you are not famous; you just did this one thing this one time and that was yesterday so why are we still talking about it?

The world leaders photo was different, though. My crazed-thirst rant about the president and his hot friends zigzagged across the internet with a speed that shocked me. It was liked 77,000 times, generated almost 6,000 comments (some of them not terrible!), and was shared 17,000 times. The great aggregation machine of the internet whirred to life and articles started popping up with headlines like “Internet User Has Hilarious Reaction to Obama Photo.” I was an Internet User! People started friending me on Facebook by the hundreds—strangers! And, a few days after the post, Leah Chernikoff, the site director of ELLE, sent me a Facebook message. “I saw your post shared by so many acquaintances. Would you consider doing more of this kind of writing?” she wrote.

That message, to which I responded with a level of overzealous exuberance that still sends shivers of embarrassment down my spine, would lead to a daily freelance humor column, called Eric Reads the News, and, later, a full-time, salaried position at ELLE. It would also eventually bring me to the attention of editors at The New York Times, provoke theater makers to express interest in reading my plays, and pave the way for this book. Publicly thirsting after a sitting president would, it turns out, change my life.

“My husband was called to his profession by God,” I would later tell people at parties or mumble to my houseplants. “I was called to my profession by a very accomplished woman in Manhattan.”

I should be asleep. It is the responsible thing to do. Although I am writing the daily column—for three weeks now!—on ELLE, I am also holding down a day job as a program director at an LGBTQ community center. Every day, I wake a few hours early, chat with Leah on Facebook Messenger about what’s happening in the news, decide on something to write about, and attempt to fire it off before running to the center. Sometimes that actually works. Other times, I am squeezing writing into my lunch breaks or carving out a quiet half hour in which I can type madly into my phone before jumping back into my day. I have never freelanced at this level before—I’ve written a couple of hyperbole-filled concert reviews for Philadelphia Magazine (“Ms. Ross’s third costume change was into a king-size periwinkle duvet cover”), but those were the kinds of things I could dash off on a Saturday morning at a coffee shop, or spend an evening after work on.

This column is a whole different animal. It feels like the already lightning-fast news cycle is speeding up. The presidential campaign is kicking into high gear now that, improbably, C-list grifter Donald Trump has made an ascent in the Republican Party and it seems clear that Hillary Clinton will not face any obstruction to her nomination in a few days from Bernie Sanders. We are in a moment where the news is, blessedly, fairly predictable, which makes it easier to make fun of. But I find that you have to be quick about it. If something happened last night, you have until maybe midday to write about it. Otherwise, the world—and the internet—will have moved on. As a spectator on the internet, someone who lives in Philadelphia and whose only understanding of the New York fashion media world of which the column is tangentially a part comes from The Devil Wears Prada, I understand the speed and the drive but I don’t really know what to do with it yet.

I am still trying to figure out what this column is, and if it will continue past, say, tomorrow. I am convinced that everyone will realize they have made a mistake in giving me money to make jokes. I am writing summaries of happenings or “reads” of newsworthy photos that, I hope, have the tone of a late night comedy monologue screamed through a bullhorn by a very excited gay black person. There are moments when I wonder if this is problematic—the audience I’m writing for is largely straight-identified, so my use of my communities’ vernaculars might read as a performance rather than a genuine expression. But this is how I was writing before—Diana’s duvet ain’t gonna describe itself, honey—and that writing was for my friends. Even the Obama thirst was, ostensibly, for people who knew me, a little note dashed off to a small community that also happens to be the entire internet. So when I wonder about the column and the hyperbole I find works well for it, I have to ask if everything about myself is minstrelsy and whether there is any part of me that actually exists in reality, and I don’t have time to sort through that. I am an Internet User and I am trying my best!

I have to get this column up and get to work. Which is why I should be asleep. I can’t be burning the midnight oil when I need to wake up in three hours, figure out what to say about the Democratic National Convention or Jeff Goldblum’s hair or Idris Elba’s absolutely everything, and then hop on the subway to my job where I am trying to make community for LGBTQ people. In reality.

I scan the darkened bedroom—the window with a view of the South Philly stadium where the convention is currently being held, the two copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up that I keep meaning to read, the armchair that I bought from a thrift store because it was on sale but that I will never sit in because I am afraid it is haunted, and my phone, now in my hand, waiting.

Don’t do it, I tell myself. Close your eyes, go to sleep, wake up, show up to work on time for once in your life, do a good job, answer all of your unread emails, donate to charity, vote, care about the world, raise a good kid or a dog (tbd), yell at fewer strangers on Facebook, smile more (unless someone on the street tells you to, in which case don’t smile), have hope (shoutout to Barack!) but also be realistic about what you can expect out of this life (shoutout to systemic oppression!), figure out what a realistic expectation for hope in this life is, be a better person, die eventually.

You know, the usual.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books (February 18, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525621032
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525621034
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.58 x 0.94 x 5.87 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #134,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #398 in Humor Essays (Books)
- #512 in Black & African American Biographies
- #4,382 in Memoirs (Books)

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R. Eric Thomas

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R. Eric Thomas is the national bestselling author of Here For It, or How to Save Your Soul in America, a Read with Jenna book club pick featured on Today and “a laugh-out-loud memoir strongly recommended for everyone” (Library Journal). Hailed as “infused with all the joy of the best teen movies” by Buzzfeed, his YA novel, Kings of B’more, was also featured on Today and was named a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. His biography of Rep. Maxine Waters, Reclaiming Her Time, co-authored with Helena Andrews-Dyer, makes “the case that political biographies shine bright when they have as much panache as their subject” (Washington Post). His latest book of essays, Congratulations, The Best is Over, will be released in August 2023.

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Courtney Robinson

Buy this book

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2023

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This book is a delight.

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Petunia

Heartwarming, honest, and funny.

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2022

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R. Eric Thomas writes from his knowledge, his empathy, and his surroundings. These essays are just a few stops in the pathway of his life. i look forward to reading more and will google him on the internet. 🎉 more glitter

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2023

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The book is great. The audiobook is superb!!

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2020

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I write so few reviews that I had to search Google for a how-to. But here I am, I found it. I’ve been reading R. Eric ever since his star-creating essay about Obama, Macron, and Trudeau. There are many times when I wish the only way I could consume current events is through R Eric Thomas’s missives and observations.
I knew his collection of essays would be at least funny. I didn’t expect them to be so thoughtful, smart, and relatable. He is the perfect writer for this shifting tumultuous time we are in. His writing is beautiful. I have decided that once I finish this last essay, I will reread it again from the beginning. I want to thank him, somehow, for being that small crack of light in these dark times. So anyway, R. Eric Thomas, if you read your reviews, thank you for it all. Thank you laying bare your experiences and then crafting them into such a kind-hearted, joyful even when sad jewel of a book.

Now....let’s write the fictional book. xo

6 people found this helpful

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David Ulmer

Waiting to laugh.

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2021

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We thought it was a comedy. It wasn’t.

Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2020

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I've spent the last few days listening to R. Eric Thomas's book #HereforIt. And it is not only completely delightful, hilarious, and well written, all of which I'm here for, but I have now decided that Eric will accompany me everywhere.

Like Jiminy Cricket he is now the voice of my conscience. I have full conversations with a tiny Eric angel and a tiny Eric devil now in my head, which used to be crowded with others, but now there is only one!

All the other, especially evil voices- BE GONE! My Mother... OUT! That one teacher that said that one thing that one time... AWAY WITH YOU! All those people who said I wasn't enough... GO TO HELL!

Eric is the fairy Godmother I've always needed. He is raw, vulnerable, and fierce! I didn't want the book to end, so when it did, I simply restarted it!

Buy the book and read it, but if you really love yourself, as you love your neighbor, you'll purchase the audiobook. Trust me, soon he'll be your Jiminy too.

44 people found this helpful

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Lynn Samuels

Some of the essays were wonderful

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2020

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Rarely do I find a series of essays completely engaging. This was better than the average and I found myself frequently googling the author to get a "picture" of who he is.

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Weagle

Gotta love a book that makes you laugh out loud

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2021

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I had never heard of R. Eric Thomas, but ordered this based on the glowing reviews and I’m glad I did. Thomas is a genuinly funny writer whose prose is both endearingly personal and wickedly funny. The descripter makes Here For It sound like a book of essays, but it really felt more like a memoir filled with humorous self discoveries via random experiences (struggles with hair products, a softball team, Christmas decor, etc.) I actually laughed out loud several times; you have to love a book that can do that.

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Cindy D

The future will be okay

Reviewed in Canada on May 10, 2021

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The past few years have just sucked. And I’ve been looking for a book to lift me up, help me find my bearings again and give me hope. My American soul needed saving and this author took me to church. Amen.

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