Skate Honors

Whiting Writers' Award

Nonfiction, 2010

The Whiting selection committee called this the most engaging of autobiographies — “intelligent, funny, utterly unsmug and unpreening. The book compellingly depicts the Orwellian truth about how childhood can be a world where it’s impossible to be good, a realm in which Sayrafiezadeh is often aware that whatever thought he’s thinking is the wrong thought to be having. The coolness and apparent detachment of the writing begin to feel like clues to the internal strategies that allowed him to survive.”