There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

An Amazon Best Book of October 2018: Casey Gerald begins and ends his passionate, voicey memoir by describing a photograph of his family taken in the early 1990s, when he was just a little boy. There’s his handsome, football-star father, his glamorous mother, his “portrait perfect” sister, and Gerald himself, with his arms outstretched like an airplane, ready to fly away. “See the family,” Gerald writes, “Savor them. Soon they will be destroyed. They will destroy each other. They will destroy themselves.” That prophetic voice, learned, perhaps, in the evangelical church Gerald’s grandfather founded, gives There Will Be No Miracles Here drama and gravity that is surprising given Gerald’s youth, but well-suited to his bust-to-boom-and-back-again story of growing up poor, gifted, and gay.

Gerald left behind his troubled family in Dallas and headed east to play football for Yale, intern at Lehman Brothers, and then study for an MBA at Harvard. A grand career in politics beckoned, but Gerald’s soul, nurtured by the language of literature (from the Bible to The Boxcar Children to The Invisible Man), proved too big for such worldly goals, and he returned to Texas to find himself. There Will Be No Miracles Here isn’t one of those memoirs politicians write before announcing an electoral run—it is something more complicated and nuanced: a depiction of the causes and costs of “upward” mobility. It’s not a prescription so much as a diagnosis, and it will leave you considering what it means to be successful, which Gerald’s memoir, by any measure, is. —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review