Especially the first and last chapters really drove home how incredible his craft is and how deep the cuts his life made are. Written in second person narration addressing his mum, Laymon lays it all bare for the world to see. The way he grounds his experiences in the way his body reacted to them added a layer to this memoir that I appreciated immensely. Laymon tells the story of his body – and how his relationship to his body is influenced by his difficult relationship to his mother. And I mean this in the best possible way (and the worst: it took me forever to finish this because I needed to take breaks to read something else). The whole book is a lesson in how to gut your reader with your words. I read very many memoirs but it is rare that I have a reaction as visceral as I had here. But even more so, the structure of this memoir is impeccable and the way he tells his story and makes is points is just brilliant. On a simple sentence by sentence level his writing is absolutely stunning, it wrecked me in the perfection of his prose. If you only take one thing from my review, let it be this: Kiese Laymon is utterly, utterly brilliant. The book was near impossible to read for me I find this memoir near impossible to review for a number of reasons: By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.Ī personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood-and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.

From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.

Heavy by kiese laymon