Art & Kinship: Garrard Conley's All the World Beside

Garrard Conley & me at the Boy Erased launch, Brooklyn, Book Court (RIP), 2016

I met Garrard Conley at a dinner in Boston years ago. Within minutes we were comparing our evangelical upbringings and cackling like old friends. He was a writing student then, and when he mentioned that he was working on a memoir about being sent by his parents to “gay conversion therapy,” the laughing stopped.¹ From there, long story short, Garrard and I came to share an agent. His tenacious, harrowing, and acutely observed memoir, Boy Erased, was published in 2016 and adapted with care into a major motion picture in 2018. Between the book, the film, and his activism, he’s helped untold numbers of queer people to feel seen and accept themselves as they are.

His first novel, All the World Beside, out last Tuesday, is a singular and magnificent work of art: tender, hopeful, shot through with dour fundamentalist judgment and a painful sense of separation, but also numinous and earthly connection. The book is set in Puritan Massachusetts and focuses on a Congregationalist minister, Nathaniel Whitfield—who’s amassed a devout flock in his heartfelt pursuit of God even as he’s driven some of his truest desires underground—and his family, none of whom easily fit the townspeople’s sense of what a minister’s family should be. As the novel moves forward, Nathaniel secretly begins an affair with the man he loves, and the town grows restive, doubtful that the minister is truly the man chosen by God to bring the awakening they were promised when they picked up their lives to follow him.

Like Boy Erased, All the World Beside takes inspiration from Garrard’s family—from his father’s work as a pastor, and from the hurt, condemnation, and distance that’s welled up between the two of them even as they’ve sought to find their way to understanding each other. The inspiration for the novel, Garrard writes in his author’s note to the galley:

emerged from a conversation between my Missionary Baptist father and me, one stemming from our shared love of eighteenth-century preachers and of religious experience. Out of this conversaton came my father’s insistence on a capital-G God and my insistence that queer people are and have always been equally as real as is experience of God. My novel is an attempt to how these two truths to be self-evident. Queer Christians exist—have existed. Queer people of all religious backgrounds exist, and history will bear these truths out.

All the World Beside sings in a different register from his memoir. As

Garth Greenwell

says, it’s “a new and ravishing music: a language that straddles the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries,” and it’s also “a vehicle for faith and desire” containing some of the finest writing in recent American fiction.

And even as the novel is a stage for gorgeous language and open-hearted imagination, it’s steeped in historical fact. That such a man as his protagonist “existed in history—that such a family existed, one where multiple queer people protected one another in the same space,” Garrard writes “is obvious to me after extensive historical research, much of which colors this novel.” His website assembles some of the diaries and letters he drew from in breathing life into the relationship between Nathaniel and his parishioner and love, Arthur Lyman.

Like many of the novels that stay with me most intensely, All the World Beside issues forth at least in part from the author’s imaginative grapplings with his biological ancestors, with what it means to be physically descended from intolerant people of judgment and queer people alike, and it also grapples with questions of inheritance from adopted family and other forms of kinship. After the minister and Arthur embark on their relationship, Nathaniel’s wife Catherine gives birth to a baby who bears traits not only from the child’s biological parents but from Arthur too. The novel excavates these kinds of complex nuances of inheritance, epigenetics, love, and influence with a light touch and also with a kind of care, depth, and truth that has stayed with me over the months since I finished the book.

Garrard and I share many ex-evangelical preoccupations, among them an enduring engagement with the language and dictates of the King James Bible. My own relationship to the scripture of my youth sometimes feels like a finger trap—the more I repudiate the hold it has on me, the more tightly it clenches, but the more curiosity and acceptance I bring to its prominence in my mind, the more clearly I’m able to see how I want to live now. One of my particular areas of obsessive rumination is the idea of “generational curses,” that the inquity of the fathers (it’s always the fathers) will be visited on their children “to the third and the fourth generation,” that the “fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”² When I asked Garrard if he had anything to share for this newsletter about how his relationship to his ancestors influenced All the World Beside, he wrote this:

The “sins of the fathers” is a phrase that has haunted me my entire life. I suppose one day I took the phrase literally by asking, “What exactly led my father, a Missionary Baptist preacher, to experience his faith in such an idiosyncratic and seemingly ahistorical manner?” This question propelled me on a journey stretching back to 18th-century colonial New England, where so many of our Protestant denominations first gained a foothold in this country. Although my father is as different from a Congregationalist minister as I believe possible, his interpretation of the Bible—his prioritization of personal, subjective experience over Enlightenment intellectual pursuits—mirrors those early instances of ecstatic religious worship found in the First and Second Great Awakenings. Once I immersed myself in these 18th-century ideas, I began to see my father there as well, along with my queer ancestors, both in the biological family that forms the core of the novel and in the chosen families that seek joy and honesty in the face of extremely dogmatic circumstances. So really the novel started with one rather abstract question and ended up living through the flesh-and-blood concerns that my characters expressed, which is how a novel should end, I believe: with a beating heart.

I’ll leave it there, except to exhort you to buy the book.

If you’re wondering, I do plan to resume our regularly scheduled wide-ranging linkful dispatch when things settle down here.

1. For privacy reasons, I can’t get into the resonances with my own family, but trust that there are resonances.

2. At one point while endlessly writing the novel that gave way to Ancestor Trouble, these verses were my epigraphs.