The Thief's Journal

by Jean Genet

A thief. A prisoner. He made beauty from what they used to condemn him.

For you if

you want to understand what it looks like when someone takes their own existence completely seriously regardless of whether the world thinks it deserves to be taken seriously

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Genet was a thief, a prostitute, a prisoner who wrote his first novel on brown paper bags in jail and had it confiscated by guards who thought it was obscene. He was right and so were they. What he was doing was taking the categories society had used to criminalize his existence — poverty, homosexuality, abjection — and transforming them into literary beauty so precise and so defiant that Sartre wrote a 600-page book trying to understand how he did it. The Thief's Journal is the autobiography of that transformation: stealing across Spain and France in the 1930s, surviving by any means available, finding in criminality and desire something that the respectable world had decided was beneath literature and insisting it was not. The most complete enactment of punk value in the catalog. Not someone writing about the margins but someone writing from inside them who refused to apologize for what he was. His later political work with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians was completely continuous with everything this book contains.

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