Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese. Laymon (Scribner, 2018) is a complexly layered book. On its face it is the memories of a man who began his life as a poor child in Mississippi and how his experiences accumulated to make him the man, the author and the professor he is today.
Kiese Laymon Heavy
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.
Writer Kiese Laymon Wants To Be Heavy. Posted by Andres O'Hara. Kiese Laymon’s memoir is far from the weight loss journey he originally envisioned. But a lot of it is about his body. He grew up as a fat kid in the South. And he continues to be shaped by the experience of being Black in America. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, KIESE LAYMON, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel, Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is also the author of the memoir Heavy. “At once tender and explosive, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy is a growing-up story laden with an unusual candor. The book is stark, beautiful, challenging, and refreshing. Laymon explores abuse, love, violence, addiction, gender, and race without ever veering into the realm of the titillating or dehumanizing.
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. 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. 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 Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. 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. 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.
Kiese Laymon Mom
Kiese Laymon Heavy An American Memoir
A 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.