The Best Memoirs of 2016

"When my father said, 'You'll never step foot in this house again if you act on your feelings. You'll never finish your education,' I thought, 'Fair enough,'" Garrard Conley writes. The year was 2004, and Conley, a college freshman, had just been outed, against his wishes. Having grown up in a strict Baptist household, Conley agreed with his parents' plan to enroll him in Love in Action, a program of "ex-gay" therapy intended to "cure" him. Patients were required to make daily moral inventories. When his mother wondered aloud what happened if you ran out of sins to write about, Garrard thought, "What my mother didn't yet know about being gay in the South was that you never ran out of material, that being secretly gay your whole life, averting your eyes every time you saw a handsome man, praying on your knees every time a sexual thought entered your mind" meant you could spend every day repenting. Some people stayed in the program for decades. Conley broke free, at the cost of years of strained relations with his parents—especially his preacher dad, who was ostracized for having an openly gay son. The triumph of this harrowing story lies not only in the reclamation of self but also in the survival of one family's love.