Book lovers:Book review of ''Inside my head am a girl''

  
BOY ERASED (River head, $27), a memoir by the debut author Garrard Conley, recounts a hellish tutelage under John Smid, the director of a so-called ex-gay therapy group called Love in Action. The son of a Baptist preacher in a small, evangelical Ozarks community, Conley is outed and at 19 enters treatment at the program’s grim facility in Memphis, earnestly hoping to cure himself. With its penchant for whiteboards and workbooks, Love in Action has the flavor of a low-budget corporate retreat and all the hallmarks of a cult. “We had to be willing to undergo extreme changes,” Conley writes, “leave people behind who were harmful to our development, who reminded us of the past.”