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When They Tell You to Be Good (Tin House, October), a debut memoir that uncovers family secrets, which radiate from the murder of the author's biological father in 1995, and charts Shakur's political coming of age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer, and anarchist in Obama's and Trump's America. Agents: Samantha Haywood and Chelene Knight. Editor: Hanif Abdurraqib. First Lines: "I was nineteen years old and traveling cross country when my mother told me that I'd die soon, like a man lunging out of a car and away from attackers. I stood in the antique shop in Montana, frozen by the cracking sound in my chest. It was the second time in five years that my mother brandished my father's murder, like a long and rusted machete. Is a mother's heartbreak worse than the heartbreak she gives her son?"
The seed for When They...