Conformityville is both a comic and dramatic story about growing up a brainiac in a working-class Black family and learning to navigate the hellish levels of intellectual and cultural blindness. The humiliation of his illiterate mother unleashes the most profound and extreme passion of humanity, and young Toussaint becomes obsessed with educating himself. The alienating neuroses, while being the catalyst for extraordinary creativity, is so bedeviling that Toussaint becomes a mysterious and labyrinthine to those around him