West Trade Review: "Cultivating identity while caught 'In-Between' : A review of Davon Loeb’s debut memoir, The In-Betweens" by Delaney Judson

by Delaney Judson

February 6, 2024

The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb; University of West Virginia Press; 280 pages; $21.99.

Being an adolescent is all about finding the road map that takes you into adulthood. Some have that road map passed down to them, whereas others seek to find theirs in reflections of self they see throughout the world. In Davon Loeb’s debut memoir, The In-Betweens, he shares how he discovered his own road map while tiptoeing along the margins of two identities.

With a compassionate hand and a lyrical style that cuts through the very heart of his journey, Loeb sheds light on the inelegant trials of teenagehood, and his own particular trials surviving his predominantly white community in New Jersey. As one of the few people of color at school, he carried the heavy weight of expectation to be the black kid who’s good at sports, eventually resulting in him becoming the black kid who’s good at dancing. He describes desires to establish a connection to his own culture clashing against pressures to perform a “digestible” sort of blackness for his white classmates: “I had no balance between being Black and acting Black. The two were inseparable… I couldn’t have existed without wearing the masks we wore. They wouldn’t have accepted us any other way.”

With each vignette, Loeb fades effortlessly between the relatable—like the undeniable feeling of place a teenager finds in their first car—and the singular—like watching his brother get pressured by teachers and students to dress up as O.J. Simpson to reenact the infamous trial for a school project.

Each lyric essay feels like both an ode to family, and an elegy to youthful uncertainty; caught

“in-between” opposing identities, he poetically spells out how his experience of searching for a role model was fraught. Loeb paints a picture of his step-dad, the macho patriarch of his family, and his envy of the fullness of his black identity. Being biracial, Loeb feels separated racially and longs to be understood by him: “And no matter how much I loved him… or I called him Dad and he called me

Son, we always would have this difference between us.” Similarly, Loeb describes looking for himself in his Jewish biological father, who’s emotional distance and physical difference made finding connection difficult. When he asks his mom about this distance, she says “your father never learned how to love.” So he looks up, everywhere: to his brothers, to basketball players (“the Angels of Paint”), to long lost kin, to comic book heroes, to holocaust survivors and to grandparents.

In the essay, “Visitations with my Father,” Loeb tells the story of going to get a tattoo with his biological father when he was in high school. He describes desperately wanting a tattoo of a compass rose and Chinese characters (reading “manifest my destiny”) on his spine for three reasons: because it was cool, because it was something he could show off, because of the ink of Tupac and Iverson. His father agreed, but asked him to sit with the map and plot out directions to the tattoo parlor, before he signed his name on the parental permission line. Somewhere in between the ink penetrating his thin skin, he sees his father pushing through the distance in order to play a parental role: “all the while, I looked to my father unlike I ever had… I think my father was just showing me that he loved me.”

Loeb’s memoir serves as an in-depth reminder that the path to discovering identity is not a straight one. That even if there is no map and no answers, going on that journey, looking around and noticing where you fall “in between,” can teach you how to connect to the world around you.

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Cultivating identity while caught “In-Between"

A review of Davon Loeb’s debut memoir, The In-Betweens

NONFICTION REVIEW

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Delaney Judson (she/they) is a senior at Ithaca College majoring in Writing and Theater Studies. Her poetry and personal essays have been featured in Stillwater Magazine.

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