When a friend suggested that Condemned for Love might be banned, I didn’t think much about it. When a second person said the same thing about a week later, I took note.

“It struck me again and again how your book would be banned in several states because it tells an ugly truth,” my friend said.

To my knowledge, no one has attempted to ban the book. But in this political climate anything can happen.

The American Library Association recorded 1,269 demands to censor library books in 2022, the most it has ever recorded. And the number is tracking higher this year.

Books are challenged, according to the association, because of their depiction of sex, violence, drug use and most often, sexual orientation.

As I see it, the common thread among the banned books is discomfort. Any book that causes discomfort among certain readers is subject to attack. The complainers want to remove these books from the public space. They don’t want their children seeing or reading them, and they don’t want you or I to have access to them.

Well, if discomfort is the accusation, I plead guilty. One of my goals in telling the story of Arthur Jordan and Elvira Corder was to describe a little known and tragic event in Virginia history. In doing so, I strove to cause discomfort.

The story centers around themes of race, sex and violence. I would like readers to finish it and pause for a moment, as my friend said, “in a stupor of shock and sadness.”

What I hear most often from audience members after I give a talk is, “I had no idea” or “They didn’t tell us about that in school.”

That’s correct. We didn’t learn about how two young people, one white and one Black, who fell in love when that choice was not theirs to make. And how it happened right here in our larger community.

We also didn’t learn about the intolerance, the aggressive ignorance, that caused the deaths of those young people.

It is similar to what we see today from those who would ban books. They want us to live with them in the darkness. It will happen only if we let them.