What is Boy Erased: A Memoir about?

Boy Erased is Garrard Conley's memoir of attending Love in Action, a conversion therapy program in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 2000s. Conley was nineteen and the son of a Baptist pastor in a small Arkansas town when he was outed to his parents by a fellow student who had assaulted him. His parents, deeply committed to their faith and convinced that homosexuality was something that could and should be changed, enrolled him in a two-week residential program. The memoir moves between his time in the program and the events that led him there.

Conley writes about conversion therapy from the inside, which means the reader experiences not just its methods but his own ambivalence during it. He genuinely loved his parents and genuinely feared losing them. He also genuinely understood, at some level, that the program's premises were false — but he was not yet in a position to act on that knowledge. The book traces the accumulation of evidence that finally allowed him to leave, and the much longer process of understanding what had been done to him and what he had allowed.

The religious context is handled with care. Conley does not write his parents as villains. They are people whose love for their son was entangled with a belief system that defined that love as requiring his transformation. His father, a pastor who eventually affirmed his son's identity years later, is a complicated figure — someone capable of change who changed slowly. The book is as much about the conditions that make conversion therapy possible — the theology, the community, the family pressure — as about the program itself.

Boy Erased was adapted into a film in 2018, directed by Joel Edgerton. The memoir is distinctive for its structural ambition — Conley uses the workbook that Love in Action required participants to complete as a formal device, interspersing its prompts with chapters of the memoir. It's a choice that allows him to inhabit and ironize the program's logic simultaneously.