Brave Face

Overview

Brave Face is Shaun David Hutchinson's own account of the depression that nearly ended his life at nineteen. Known for young adult novels like We Are the Ants, Hutchinson turns here to memoir, tracing the slow accumulation of fear, shame, and isolation that convinced him he had no future worth living.

Much of the book is concerned with untangling two things he once believed were the same problem: being depressed and being gay. Hutchinson describes a young adulthood spent absorbing the idea that queerness foreclosed any chance at love or happiness, a belief that compounded his depression rather than explaining it. The memoir follows him through that confusion to the point of crisis, and then through survival.

What follows the attempt is not a tidy recovery narrative but a longer, uneven process of learning to accept himself and to want to keep living. The book ends less with resolution than with the ongoing, sometimes difficult work of believing things can get better.

A Memoirist Looking Back at His Own Fiction

Brave Face sits in conversation with Hutchinson's novels, many of which feature young characters wrestling with isolation, grief, and the question of whether life is worth continuing. The memoir makes explicit what those books approached through fiction: a writer drawing directly on his own adolescence to explain why those themes recur in his work.

The book also pushes back against a common narrative in LGBTQ young adult literature, in which coming out functions as a turning point toward happiness. Hutchinson complicates that arc by insisting that his depression and his sexuality were separate struggles that happened to collide, and that neither fully explains the other. In doing so, the memoir contributes to a broader conversation about how mental illness is represented for teenage readers, particularly within stories about queer identity, where the two are often conflated or treated as a single problem with a single solution.

Why Brave Face Has Been Challenged

Some adults reviewing the book for school libraries have focused on the fact that it describes, from the inside, the thinking that preceded a suicide attempt, and have argued that handing teenagers a detailed, sympathetic account of that mindset risks normalizing or even modeling the behavior rather than discouraging it. Others have raised the same concern that frequently accompanies LGBTQ memoirs in school collections: that a frank account of a gay author's adolescence, including his depression and his relationship to his own sexuality, is not age-appropriate material for younger students, regardless of the book's ultimately hopeful arc. Within this catalog, Brave Face has been the subject of 3 state-level and 11 district-level challenges, most of them centered on these two concerns rather than on any single passage or scene. Defenders of the book counter that its unflinching honesty about depression and suicidal ideation is precisely what makes it valuable to the readers most likely to recognize themselves in it, and that withholding such accounts does less to protect teenagers than to isolate the ones already struggling.