Heavy

“I still wrote every night and revised every morning, but practicing crafting formidable sentences just made me a formidable sentence writer. The other part of writing required something more than just practice, something more than reading, too. It required loads of unsentimental explorations of black love. It required an acceptable of our strange. And mostly, it required a commitment to new structures, not reformation” (131)

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

This memoir tells of author Kiese Laymon’s life from childhood up through his professorship at Vassar. Each sentence is both blistered with light and nuanced by darkness as Laymon tells of his relationship with his mother and how the aftershocks of that relationship have continued to shake and shape him throughout his life.

Laymon’s mother, a brilliant, vibrant, and strict black woman and professor, abused Laymon throughout his childhood; she also inspired and instilled confidence within him, nurtured his respect for language and knowledge, and taught him the importance of black power and community. Laymon recounts, in carefully-crafted, rhythmic, dynamic prose, what growing up felt like for him: the love of his grandma, the schools he attended before college, the culture among young black kids in Jackson, MS. And then he moves, telling of his time spent at Mississippi’s Millsaps, where he began using his writing as activism and was met with racism; telling of his transfer to Oberlin; his subsequent studies at Indiana University. He tells of his writing, the people he met, his investment in black students and black writers, his growth…and his shrinking, for all of these experiences were underpinned by the emergence of a furious eating disorder, an inexhaustible illness which carved the fat young man into someone compact, then slender, then emaciated: counting calories, running miles in the morning and miles at night, fainting in the line at the grocery. When a breaking point is finally reached, Laymon writes of reckoning with the force of addiction writ large that is present in him and his family alike, attempting reconciliation with and love toward his mother, and healing.

This memoir recounts and evokes all of the dark that shines through the light, all of the black that shines through the white, and all of the heaviness that can be present even in the weightless body. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): Incest, sexual assault, fatmisia, racism, racist hate speech, eating disorders, physical abuse, rape.

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