Long Review
The Crazy Great Journey is a slim but intense memoir about a gay ex-con, abuse survivor, and literary agitator who keeps choosing to build something for other people long after most would have quit. Beginning with a reluctant teenage reading of Jaws and ending with a 2036 vision of a fully realized Texas Authors Museum, the book traces how one life moves from shame and survival into service, advocacy, and legacy-building for writers who are usually ignored.
Structurally, the memoir is organized into four core chapters and an epilogue: “The Spark and the Shadows,” “Building a Bridge for Others,” “Vision in the Ashes,” “Crazy Great,” and “The Vision Ahead.” Each section works like a focused movement rather than a blow-by-blow autobiography. The narrative hits key turning points—the first byline from prison, the founding and collapse of an early publishing house, the birth of the Texas Association of Authors, the creation of the Texas Authors Museum, and the repeated experience of losing everything and starting over.
At the center is B. Alan Bourgeois himself, rendered not as a polished hero but as a working organizer with visible scars. The book is blunt about incarceration, homelessness (including living in a storage unit and later a car), homophobia, and the long shadow of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. What keeps the narrative from collapsing into trauma memoir is the throughline of purpose: the determination to help other authors be seen, to build infrastructure for Texas writers, and to leave behind a physical and cultural home for stories.
Tone-wise, the book lives in the space between grit and stubborn hope. There is anger in the recollection of the Olympic Park bomber’s attack on a gay bar and the media’s quick silence, and later in the response to 2025 Texas laws designed to suppress minority and LGBTQ+ voices under the guise of “education reform.” There is grief in the loss of the author’s mother’s ashes during a catastrophic 2022 collapse. Yet the dominant emotional note is endurance—an insistence on moving forward, simplifying, and focusing the mission rather than surrendering.
Thematically, The Crazy Great Journey weaves together resilience, service, and the politics of visibility. It speaks directly to what happens when marginalized people are erased from the cultural record and what it costs, personally and financially, to push back. The Texas Authors Association, DEAR Texas, the Texas Authors Institute of History, and the ReadSafe Ratings program are presented less as résumé items and more as survival strategies for a literary ecosystem under pressure. The museum is framed not as a vanity project, but as a necessary counterweight to censorship and historical amnesia.
Stylistically, the prose is plainspoken, fast-moving, and largely scene-light. The voice favors summary over dramatized episodes: years of work, collapse, and rebuilding are sometimes handled in a single paragraph. That choice gives the book a sense of momentum and clarity—events and motivations are never confusing—but it also means the narrative reads more like a reflective field report than an immersive, cinematic memoir. Readers who prefer lyrical digressions or deep scene-building may find the style almost brutally direct.
The book’s greatest strengths lie in its honesty and its moral spine. There is no self-pity in the accounts of homelessness, no sugarcoating of how the literary establishment treated indie and small-press authors, and no false modesty about the scale of the museum vision. The memoir is particularly powerful when it shows the tension between being an exhausted, often broke individual and the size of the dream—preserving the work and legacy of Texas authors in a permanent institution by the state’s bicentennial in 2036.
There are, however, trade-offs. The brevity of the book means some potentially rich areas—the details of abuse, family dynamics beyond the mother’s death, romantic and community life as a gay man in Texas, and the inner spiritual process hinted at through music and “whispered” conversations with the Universe—are sketched rather than excavated. Some readers may wish for more granular detail about key campaigns, failures, and political fights. Others may feel the mission-driven focus occasionally tilts toward manifesto, especially in the later chapters.
For its intended audience, though—authors, activists, organizers, queer readers, Texans, and anyone who has tried to build something bigger than their bank account—The Crazy Great Journey delivers a clear, unvarnished account of what long-term service looks like when the world is not set up to help. It is less about inspiration in the abstract and more about stamina, sacrifice, and the audacity of continuing anyway. As a compact testament to one person’s refusal to let stories or storytellers be erased, it is both sobering and galvanizing.
Short Review
The Crazy Great Journey is a lean, unsentimental memoir tracing how a gay ex-con and abuse survivor becomes a relentless advocate for Texas authors and readers. From a first published story written in prison to founding a small press, then the Texas Association of Authors, DEAR Texas, and ultimately the Texas Authors Museum, the book follows a life repeatedly knocked flat by financial collapse, homelessness, and grief—including the loss of the author’s mother’s ashes—yet stubbornly oriented toward service.
Told in four concise chapters and an epilogue, the narrative favors directness over sentiment, compressing decades of work, failure, and reinvention into a clear arc: discover the power of story, suffer the consequences of being visibly queer and formerly incarcerated, and choose, again and again, to build structures that help other writers be seen. Along the way, the book addresses rising censorship in Texas and the creation of the ReadSafe Ratings program as a tactical response, framing literary advocacy as both cultural work and quiet resistance.
Readers seeking lush prose and deep scene-by-scene reconstruction may find the style almost reportorial, but those who appreciate blunt honesty and a strong moral compass will likely find it compelling. This is a story for people who have been told they are “too much” or “not enough” and kept going anyway—and for anyone curious what it really costs, in time, money, and emotional wear, to build a sanctuary for stories in hostile times.
One-Sentence Review
A blunt, compact memoir of a gay ex-con turned literary organizer, The Crazy Great Journey charts how one exhausted but relentless builder turns personal scars into a long-term fight for authors’ visibility and legacy.
Book Rating
📘📘📘📘 – Strongly Recommended: A clear-eyed, mission-driven memoir whose emotional honesty and relentless focus on service will resonate deeply with authors, activists, and outsiders, even if its brevity leaves some life chapters sketched rather than fully explored.
Pull Quotes (1–2)
- “This memoir reads less like a redemption arc engineered for sympathy and more like a work log of survival and service in a culture that keeps trying to erase certain voices.”
- “For readers who have ever wondered whether their small, stubborn efforts matter, this book offers a hard-won answer: they do—especially when they are for others.”
Content Notes
• Language: Generally mild; one instance of coarse language (“bitch”) quoted in context of a prison interaction; no pervasive profanity.
• Violence: References to real-world violence (Olympic Park bombing, attack on a gay bar) and systemic harm (abuse, homophobia, homelessness, censorship), but no graphic on-page depictions.
The Crazy Great Journey
• Sexual Content: No on-page sexual scenes; mentions of being propositioned in prison and of surviving sexual abuse, without graphic detail.
• Drugs/Alcohol: No significant focus on drug or alcohol use beyond incidental references.
• Sensitive Topics: Homophobia, incarceration, homelessness, physical/sexual/emotional abuse, grief over a parent’s death and loss of ashes, poverty, and political/censorship pressures on minority and LGBTQ+ authors.
ReadSafe Rating
• Rating: PG-13
• Labels: V, ST
• Explanation: The book addresses incarceration, abuse, homophobia, homelessness, political oppression, and real-world violence (including bombings and anti-gay attacks), but does so in a non-graphic, reflective manner aimed at adult readers. References to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, along with systemic discrimination and grief, justify the Sensitive Topics (ST) label. Mentions of violent events and threats, without explicit detail, warrant the Violence (V) label while remaining within PG-13 territory rather than R.