“The Children We Left Behind” - Book Review

The strength of Coleman’s writing here is that he makes you see this tragic and unfair world through the eyes of an innocent child, one who had no say in his fate.

Hi all,

When I was writing my article on the Daniel Penny trial several months ago, I posted tweets on X about how Jordan Neely — the man who was choked to death by Penny — suffered a horrible childhood. I was bothered by the media spectacle of Neely’s father holding a press conference and announcing that he was suing Penny. He was never a father to Neely and yet he showed up for a chance at a payday.

Neely’s upbringing was one tragedy after another. Aside from having no father, his mother did everything she could and yet was tragically murdered by a boyfriend. That same boyfriend chose to act as his own lawyer during the trial, forcing a young Neely to face his mother’s killer. With no family to take him in, Neely entered the foster care system and aged out into a lost life of drugs and psychological issues.

Adam Coleman, a writer, reached out on X and asked me for the source material behind my posts, which I provided. He then told me that he had grown up hard like Neely and was writing a book on his childhood. A few months later, Coleman asked if I would read and review an advance copy of his new book, “The Children We Left Behind.”

The read was not an easy one. Coleman doesn’t pull punches. The first three pages lists all the questions he’s asked his entire life about why his father abandoned him. The power of reading these questions one by one is that they reveal the innocence and pain of young Coleman’s mind and the self-torture that ensues when he receives no answers in return. The father brought Coleman into the world and yet doesn’t care for the child. He was simply, as Coleman writes, disinterested.

His mother struggled to raise him and his older sister by herself. Coleman criticizes our culture’s notion of the single mom as a superhero of sorts, not out of disparagement, but to remind us that they are women of the flesh who cut and bleed like the rest of us. There is nothing glamorous about their lives.

Coleman’s mother, a nurse, struggled to find a life of steadiness for her children and often failed. They moved to four states before his teenage years and had to seek refuge in shelters at times. In one particular scene, a relative offered to take them in only to turn abusive against Coleman, coming at him for making the slightest noise. To his mom’s credit, she moved the family on immediately when she learned of what had happened.

Coleman reminds the reader here that his family was far from alone:

…in 2023, more than 111,600 children from 57,000 families were homeless in the United States. Out of those children, over 10,500 of them lived outside of shelters, and 3,000 lived on their own without a guardian.

Coleman’s childhood is one of paying for his father’s sin of abandoning him. It became too much for him when he was 8 years old and he suffered a nervous breakdown of sorts. In one of the stronger passages of the book, he describes how he was taken to this massive institution upstate New York without knowledge that he was to be left there all by himself. He envies the prisoner who knows how much time is left in his sentence for he did not know how long he would have to endure this fate:

I was a suffering child, filled with emotions that I didn’t know how to manage, born out of years of dysfunction and abandonment. However, to the mental health professionals in this facility, I was a subject, or inmate, who required being monitored to scrutinize all signs of emotional reactions and issue subjective silent rulings to determine my fate on their sliding scale sentencing structure. They were my capturers, not my saviors.

Unlike Jordan Neely, Coleman found the strength to survive his childhood. When he learned that his father passed away — some months after the actual death — he felt nothing. To him, his father had died long before.

Somehow, young Coleman learned how to seal up himself, to repress enough of the pain, in order to make the hard decisions that allowed him to move forward with his life. One can never make up for the lack of a father but, as unfair as it is, one can figure out how to reclaim agency over one’s life, as Coleman did.

By chance, when I was editing the “White Guilt” documentary this week, I came upon a clip of Spike Lee in the same Nightline episode with my father. Here, Lee talks about how important it was for him to grow up in a two-parent household:

Coleman hits a similar note to Lee in the latter chapters of his book. He stresses the importance of the child to grow up with two parents. A mother can never be the father and “father figures” can never replace the real thing. Coleman strikes hard notes here, even militantly. He blames the western culture for putting the comfort of parents before the children, for permitting them to abandon the children, and for allowing them to make excuses. (When Jordan Neely’s father showed up at the press conference did any of the reporters ask him where he had been all of Jordan’s life?) For Coleman, the child must come first. Why else have the child?

Throughout this book, Coleman writes as a survivor and from a place of emotion. The book could have been tightened here and there with stronger editing but when the passages hit they leave a mark. The strength here is that Coleman makes you see this tragic and unfair world through the eyes of an innocent child, one who had no say in his fate. Now Adam Coleman does.

The book is available April 1, and you can preorder here.

My best,

Eli