Autoboyography

Autoboyography

Author: Christina Lauren

Rating: A

Vibe: I've never seen Mormon Utah written this accurately, and somehow it's also a great romance.

Early in this book there's a framed Families Are Forever hanging on a wall.

A decorative print, the kind of thing sold at Deseret Book between the leather journals and the temple-shaped bookends. To most readers it's wallpaper. If you've stood in those living rooms, it's an entire cosmology in four words — a promise about eternity that comes with a guest list, and a kid in the room quietly working out whether he's on it. I put the book down.

The story: Tanner Scott has one semester of high school left and one plan, which is to leave. He's bisexual, out to his parents — mom's ex-Mormon, dad's Jewish, both of them frankly better at this than most parents in fiction — and closeted everywhere else since the family moved from California to Provo three years ago. His mother asked him to be. She was protecting him. It still cost him three years. Then his best friend Autumn dares him into Seminar, the class where you write a novel in four months, and the mentor turns out to be Sebastian Brother: nineteen, BYU, bishop's son, already published the book he wrote in Seminar, mission looming. Tanner, being a teenager with a deadline and a crush, writes a novel about him.

But the plot isn't what made me sit up. That print wasn't a fluke — the whole book is built out of that kind of accuracy. BYU's Harris Fine Arts Center shows up as the place the theater kids and the painters and the quietly-something kids collected, the one square of that campus where being a little strange read as artistic instead of concerning. The building's gone now — BYU demolished it in 2023, and the thing they built to replace it opens this fall — which gives the novel an accidental melancholy it didn't have in 2017. There's 3.2 beer, the famously pointless brew Utah grocery stores were stuck with for eighty-six years before the state finally gave up in 2019. A signing at Deseret Book, staged exactly right. And the mission, which the book correctly refuses to treat as an obstacle in a nineteen-year-old's path. The mission is the path. It's the direction Sebastian's entire life has been pointed since he was a toddler in a clip-on tie.

Here's what I can't shake. Most of our fiction about the closet is about being kept there by people who hate you. This one is about being kept there by people who love you. Sebastian's family is warm. His faith gives him something real, and the book flatly refuses to sneer at it. There's no bigot to point at, no villain to organize your anger around — just a beautiful, generous world that says yes to everything about him except one thing, and a boy trying to find a way to want both. That's so much harder to write than a homophobe, and so much more familiar to anyone who's lived it. You don't get rage. You get an ache with no address to send it to.

The other thing the book understands is leaving. Tanner's whole survival strategy is get out of state, become a person somewhere else, and that is a plan about as old as time. What the book refuses to pretend is that leaving is free. The people who stay become people you used to know. Some of them can't go. Some of them don't want to. And loving one of them means asking him to trade his entire world for you, which is a hell of a thing to ask at eighteen.

Complaints, since taste is subjective and I'm not running a press release: I spent a good third of this book wanting to hug both boys and then knock their heads together. Tanner pushes when he should wait and disappears when he should stay. But that's not the writing failing, that's the age — adult feelings, learner's permit — and I'd take honest and maddening over tidy every time.

Spoiler-free, so I'll only say the ending got something out of me I don't give up easily.

Final take: A. It's a romance, it's a novel about writing a novel, and it's the only Provo in fiction I've ever recognized. If you've got any proximity to this world, fair warning — it'll find a bruise you forgot about. If you don't, read it anyway. It'll explain the pressure better than any documentary could.