The first time I spoke with Glenn Loury, my initial impression was “Does this guy always speak in full paragraphs?”

　　Two weeks after the Supreme Court’s decision that struck down affirmative action, I’d emailed the veteran black economist for research I was doing on the conservative movement’s complicated relationship with racial issues, and he’d foolishly accepted. Now, I was listening to the Brown University professor absolutely spike Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for her dissent in SFFA v. Harvard. “Biden picked a lesser black woman,” Loury insisted. “She’s a pedestrian and moderately-qualified judge who happened to be the right demographic. [Clarence] Thomas is citing Montesquieu and the Founders, and KBJ is citing Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is the Constitution of the United States of America. It’s sophomoric.”

　　Coming from someone of Loury’s caliber, “sophomoric” actually cuts. The economist has lectured all over the world, from New York to Delhi, and became the first black tenured professor at Harvard at just 33 years old. Loury is approaching 20 years of teaching at Brown University, and has marked the memoir-writing point in his life with the release of his autobiography Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Whatever highlights you think might be in the memoir of an MIT-trained theoretical economist, reading the book will actually leave you surprised at the amount of lowlights—Loury minces no words and spares few details when discussing his decidedly-not-admirable personal life, from his lifelong struggle with marital fidelity to crippling cocaine addiction. “I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them,” he opens.

　　The scandals and personal drama drive the memoir’s plot forward, painting two very different pictures of a boy raised in Chicago’s South Side. On the surface, what Loury often calls the “cover story,” he is a brilliant and iconoclastic public intellectual, unafraid of challenging the zeitgeist of both right and left and delighting in unraveling tremendous intellectual problems and applying the insights gained to the most pressing social problems around him. Below the surface, the “real story,” Loury reveals himself to be a deeply flawed serial cheater with an addictive personality that drives him into the waiting arms of countless mistresses during two of his three marriages and even hooks him on cocaine. I tried casually counting the amount of affairs and relapses in this book, and struggled. It’s not a memoir for those looking for a hero. It’s a memoir about a man who, while confronting (or often dancing with) his own demons, simultaneously felt called to fight the trends of groupthink and strict ideological lockstep that too often categorized the sea of black political and social thought in which he swam.

　　Given that my only conversation with Loury was about affirmative action, it’s hard to not interpret the book through that lens. Indeed, it’s difficult to interpret much of the rich history of minorities in American politics more generally without that lens. Is Loury an example of how affirmative action gets brilliant people of color into places they wouldn’t have gotten into otherwise, or an example of how patronizing the system is for discounting those people’s own initiative and resolve to succeed despite obstacles?

　　Loury’s story is not merely one of sins and successes, but of the ever-present search for identity and fulfillment through deviancy—and a thousand other little trysts in self-discovery.

　　Loury’s position throughout the book, and in public life, is very clear. “Don’t judge [black Americans] by a different standard,” he exhorts audiences. “Why are you lowering the bar? What’s going on there? Is that about guilt or pity? Tell me a pathway to equality that is rooted in either of those things.” Even in our conversation, he leaned into his belief that affirmative action has not elicited greatness from the black community in America. “I have an analysis, and it’s not pretty. The problem confronting black Americans is not oppression—it’s freedom. They’re gonna be patted on the head and patronized and managed while the 21st-century roars ahead. These people who are making excuses for thugs and bellyaching about why they can’t pass a test are going to the dustbin of history.”

　　Loury has no quarter for modern antiracist “intellectuals” such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi—he once called the latter an “empty-suited, empty-headed motherf*cker”—and his memoir is full of intellectual skepticism toward many on both right and left. In truth, Loury has spent a career fence-hopping between right and left in a bid to assuage both a desire for intellectual consistency and his own personal contrarian desire to just be a gadfly. If one considers the professional difference between the Loury who considers himself a neocon and is associated with the likes of Irving Kristol and Reagan and the Loury who publicly resigned from the American Enterprise Institute after the publishing of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, it reads like the tale of a double agent, almost as much as Loury’s personal life.

　　Loury, per the book, was indeed the beneficiary of affirmative action, and his detractors would likely paint his criticisms of the system as punching down, the complaints of a man seeking to pull the ladder up after him, and further proof of the moral bankruptcy of conservative-leaning positions on race. Yet, this accusation can hardly be applied to Loury: although he benefited from affirmative action in certain cases, he details in Late Admissions the way that such benefits came with costs, including the fear of being seen as a “charity case” after being prematurely admitted into a prestigious university’s economics department based on race and failing to measure up.

　　Although the book might be viewed (and to an extent, rightfully so) as a cathartic, confessional tale, it’s much more than that. Loury made choices through his decades in the public eye and, by the looks of things, has suffered the consequences of the bad ones as much as reaped the rewards of the good ones. His story is not merely one of sins and successes, but of the ever-present search for identity and fulfillment through deviancy, academic validation, clout-chasing, religion, political affiliation, and a thousand other little trysts in self-discovery contained within Late Admissions’ pages. Now at 75, Loury is putting everything out for the world to see—a move that comes with risk, but seems an attempt at catharsis for the aging economist. Perhaps the risk of being known, failures and all, pales in comparison to the risk of being seen as a fake. Only time will tell how that risk pans out for Loury.

　　When I interviewed Loury, I asked about the concepts of colorblindness and postracialism, and whether he thought Americans could truly unlearn race (days before, I’d asked a DEI practitioner the same question and gotten an unequivocal “no”). To my surprise, Loury seemed surprised by the question. “‘Postracial’ asks a lot more. It’s not about merely discrimination, it’s about melting down the barriers completely,” he mused. “Let’s call the whole thing off. I’m okay with that—it’s way better than the race-mongering police. It’s premodern.”

　　“But,” he continued, “I’m also proud to be an African-American. I’m a black American. If I say my people, I’m probably talking about … my people.” He paused, then chuckled. “Maybe I should outgrow that.” Outgrowing—that word seems to accurately describe much of what Loury recounts in the book, from adultery to cocaine addiction to the persistent urge to treat other people as pawns to achieve his own goals. He repeatedly describes his infidelities as the outworking of his attempts to become the ultimate player or the “master of the universe” an objective Loury picked up as a young man hearing about the sexual conquests of older male relatives on Chicago’s south side—by the end of the book, no such mention is made. From a serial player in his personal life to a serial contrarian in his professional life, the thread of Loury’s story is one of maturation, slowly putting to death his worst instincts and perhaps even finding peace as a result.

　　When Loury arrived at MIT in 1972, he carried a briefcase with a sticker on it that proclaimed “Rise Above It!” In a sense, Late Admissions may be Glenn Loury’s next attempt to do just that.