Giovanni’s Room ruined me and here’s why
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin left me staring at a wall after finishing it. I genuinely felt sick to my stomach—not because of anything graphic, but because of the sheer emotional weight of the story. He writes with such precision and intensity that it felt like his words reached into my chest and prodded bits of my soul I wasn’t ready to examine.
Baldwin didn’t just write about queer love. He wrote about fear. Shame. Loneliness. The way silence can grow between people like mold. The way denial isn’t a single act but a thousand little choices that erode something beautiful before it can survive. The story is deceptively simple: an American man in 1950s Paris, David, falls in love with Giovanni, a tender and passionate Italian man, but cannot accept what that love means. And in that gap between desire and denial, everything falls apart.
“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
What made this book hit so hard wasn’t just the plot, it was how true it felt. Baldwin writes with the kind of clarity that feels invasive, like he’s describing thoughts you’ve had but never told anyone. I felt that most in this passage:
"And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
That passage took the air out of me. Not necessarily because it was poetic (though it is), but because it felt like a sentence I could’ve written in my own journal on a night I don’t talk about. And that is kind of terrifying.
No one in this book is flat or conveniently “evil” (except Guillaume—rot forever). Baldwin gives every character depth, even when they make choices that hurt. David is not an easy character to love, but he’s not meant to be. He’s frustrating and cowardly, but never flat. David spends most of the novel performing versions of himself: the good American boy, the heterosexual fiancé, the man in control. But these identities are costumes stitched together by fear. He doesn’t know who he is, only who he thinks he’s supposed to be. The tragedy is that David isn’t hiding from the world—he’s hiding from himself. And that self is messy, contradictory, deeply queer, and deeply afraid. The tension between the life he wants and the life he believes he should want becomes unbearable. His identity is shaped more by shame and societal pressure than by honesty or desire, and the more he runs from it, the more damage he does—to Giovanni, to Hella, and to himself. His love for Giovanni is real, but so is his fear of what it would mean to claim it. And Baldwin doesn’t let him off the hook for that.
Giovanni, on the other hand, is messy, luminous ,and tragic. He opens his whole self, unguarded, and is met with silence. Watching him unravel—abandoned, criminalised, condemned—was one of the most painful reading experiences I’ve had in years.
The room itself, their little apartment, becomes almost a character: a fragile pocket of tenderness, domestic and soft, that you know won’t last. And yet, you want to stay there with them. To let the outside world stay out. But that’s not the world Baldwin writes, he writes the one we live in. One where shame is inherited and enforced. Where queerness is punished not only by society, but by the people closest to us—even the people who share it.
What Baldwin captures with brutal elegance is this: shame is a quiet destroyer. It doesn’t always explode. Sometimes it just seeps in—into your voice, your choices, your silences—until it takes everything from you, including the chance to be truly known.
“And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.”
I will be thinking about Giovanni’s Room for a very long time. Maybe forever. The ending broke me. It’s a short novel that carries the weight of a lifetime.
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