I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE

A heartfelt memoir about overcoming long odds to rise from poverty, dysfunction, and the tyranny of low expectations.

Conyers takes his title from a terrible fact: His mother, addicted to crack cocaine, wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but her medical problems would have put her at too much risk. “My mother reluctantly agreed to keep the baby, but she didn’t stop smoking crack,” he writes. “Neither did my father.” His father wound up in jail, while his mother shuffled between housing projects in New York and a crime-riddled neighborhood near Virginia Beach. When he “started to learn that my parents’ devotion to their drug habit was stronger than their devotion to me,” Conyers resolved to live by his considerable wits, helped along by teachers who tried to keep him off the streets. Even so, he writes, “being smart and doing sports weren’t going to keep me safe or alive in the South Bronx,” which required the protection of a gang. The author drifted between often brilliant but occasionally indifferent moments in school until he wandered into a debate class and found that he was a natural fit for a competitive art that relied in equal parts on hard facts, diligent research, and meaningful emotional argument. Throughout, as he stresses, he selected and populated the proverbial village that would raise him, paying attention—if sometimes grudgingly, in weaker moments—to mentors who gave him memorable advice, such as one principal who said, “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready when opportunity comes your way.” Conyers seized those opportunities, taking another teacher’s advice “not to give up or wait for the world to change its rules for me,” becoming a respiratory therapist and attentively raising a strong family of his own while cultivating the extended family he celebrates, among them a childhood friend who, long imprisoned, “is still part of my village.”

Inspirational but never sentimental, with many lessons on “adding value to the world.”