Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon is the Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi and author of the novel Long Division, the memoir Heavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He was recently named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.
"Heavy is a gorgeous, gutting book that's fueled by candor yet
freighted with ambivalence. It's full of devotion and betrayal,
euphoria and anguish, tender embraces and rough abuse...the
liberation on offer doesn't feel light and unburdened; it feels
heavy like the title, and heavy like the truth...Salvation would
feel too weightless--as if [Laymon] could forget who he is and
where he has been. This generous, searching book explores all the
forces that can stop even the most buoyant hopes from ever leaving
the ground."
--New York Times, The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years "With
echoes of Roxane Gay and John Edgar Wideman, Laymon defiantly
exposes the 'aches and changes' of growing up black in this raw,
cathartic memoir reckoning with his turbulent Mississippi
childhood, adolescent obesity, and the white gaze."
--O Magazine "The wonder of Laymon's book is his commitment to
getting as close to the truth as possible, even when it means
asking painful questions about what we owe the people who brought
us into this world and, somehow, managed to keep us alive in it. In
doing so, he compels us to consider the costs of an insistence on
excellence as a means to an end and the only conceivable option for
a black kid in America ... Laymon's writing, as rich and elegant as
mahogany, offers us comfort even as we grapple with the book's
unflinching honesty."
--New York Times Book Review "Laymon's sentences carry a bone-deep
crackle of authenticity ... Alongside the heartbreak of these
rhythmic, sensual sentences is a forceful, declarative honesty.
Here, too, is the conjuring of what it might be like to be inside
another body ... This is a generous conversation about the weight
of racism, and the painful pressures placed on familial love. We're
lucky to eavesdrop."
--San Francisco Chronicle "This stand-out memoir of 2018 by Kiese
Laymon pulls no punches. No one is let off the hook, especially not
Laymon himself, as he explores family, the construction of self,
toxic masculinity, and more in this highly-anticipated follow-up to
his breakthrough essay collection How to Kill Yourself and Others
in America. But mostly, Heavy is about the weight of what we carry.
It is about the stories we believe about ourselves--both as
individuals and as black people in America, and the new stories we
can create if we try harder than we ever thought possible."
--The Root "[Heavy] take[s] on the important work of exposing the
damage done to America, especially its black population, by the
failure to confront the myths, half-truths, and lies at the
foundation of the success stories that the nation worships. In the
process, Laymon ... dramatize[s] a very different route to victory:
the quest to forge a self by speaking hard truths, resisting
exploitation, and absorbing with grace the cost of being black in
America while struggling to live a life of virtue...You won't be
able to put [this memoir] down, but not because [it is] breezy
reading. [It is], in Laymon's multilayered word, heavy--packed with
reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred yet are also
pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in
intimate grappling with black realities."
--The Atlantic "A searing memoir which unpacks racism and what it
means for this black author to truly make sense of himself and the
world around him."
--Vanity Fair "Heavy is one of the most important and intense books
of the year because of the unyielding, profoundly original and
utterly heartbreaking way it addresses and undermines expectations
for what exactly it's like to possess and make use of a male black
body in America ... the book thunders as an indictment of hope, a
condemnation of anyone ever looking forward."
--LA Times "Staggering ... Laymon lays out his life with startling
introspection. Heavy is comforting in its familiarity, yet exacting
in its originality ... Laymon subtitled his book, 'An American
Memoir, ' and that's more than a grandiose proclamation. He is a
son of this nation whose soil is stained with the blood and sweat
of his ancestors. In a country both deserving of his love and hate,
Laymon is distinctly American. Like the woman who raised him and
the woman who raised her, he carries that weight, finding uplift
from sorrow and shelter from the storms that batter black
bodies."
--Boston Globe "Heavy calls up Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, and
Laymon's fixation on his fluctuating weight will remind readers of
Roxane Gay's Hunger. But it's his analysis of growing up black in a
white-dominated society, bringing instant connections to Ta-Nehisi
Coates' Between the World and Me, that dominates the book...the
rawness of his experiences gives Heavy its power."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer "Oh my god, it is so good. It is so good
that I had to cancel all my plans the evening I finished it to lay
down and let it sit on my brain. It is so good that I am actively
shrinking in intimidation before this review -- how can one
appropriately honor the scopeless effort of another's reckoning?
The courage it takes to turn the pen on oneself? And then publish
what happens there?"
--Michigan Daily "Stunning...Laymon is a gifted wordsmith born and
educated in the land of Welty and Faulkner, and his use of
language, character and sense of place put Heavy neatly into the
storied Southern Gothic canon. Yet the defining elements of his art
-- cadence, dialogue, eye for detail, mordant wit -- are firmly
rooted in the African-American experience. Laymon has created
Gothic's not-so-distant black relative...for a book that has the
author's disturbing childhood as a metaphor for African-Americans'
pursuit of unattained happiness and perhaps unattainable racial
freedom, Heavy is surprisingly light on its feet."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Heavy is a compelling record of
American violence and family violence, and the wide, rutted embrace
of family love ... Kiese Laymon is a star in the American literary
firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and
singularly beautiful. Heavy is at once a paean to the Deep South, a
condemnation of our fat-averse culture, and a brilliantly rendered
memoir of growing up black, and bookish, and entangled in a family
that is as challenging as it is grounding."
--NPR.org "Heavy is the story of a young black man raised in
Jackson, Mississippi by a single mother and confronted with the
twin prejudices of racism and body-shaming. Kiese, who has always
struggled with his weight, is trapped in an America that both
promotes and despises fatness, an America that polices his body in
more ways than one. The memoir layers this systemic and omnipresent
violence against black bodies with tales of Laymon's complicated
relationship with his mother and the love and redemption he finds
in his grandmother."
--City Pages "Staggering ... a heartbreaking narrative on black
bodies: how we hurt them, protect them, and try to heal them."
--Elle.com, Best Books of 2018 "Weight is both unavoidably
corporeal and a load-bearing metaphor in novelist-essayist Kiese
Laymon's sharp, (self-)lacerating memoir, addressed to the single
teen mom turned professor who raised him to become exceptional...a
deeply personal book, where race, class, and the scars of sexual
violence are front and center."
--New York Magazine "Laymon's memoir is a reckoning, pulling from
his own experience growing up poor and black in Jackson,
Mississippi, and tracking the most influential relationships, for
better or worse, of his life: with his brilliant but struggling
single mother, his loving grandma, his body and the ways he
nurtures and punishes it, his education and creativity, and the
white privilege that drives the world around him...with shrewd
analysis, sharp wit, and great vulnerability -- Laymon forces the
reader to fully consider the effects of the nation's inability to
reconcile its pride and ambition with its shameful history."
--Buzzfeed "This memoir from Kiese Laymon, whose previous books
include the novel Long Division, looks at what it's like to grow up
different in the American South. "
--Town & Country "Laymon revisits the abuse he suffered growing up
both black and obese in Mississippi, as well as his complex
relationship with his mother. A book for people who appreciated
Roxane Gay's memoir Hunger."
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Laymon examines his relationship with
his mother growing up as a black man in the South, exploring how
racial violence suffered by both impacts his physical and emotional
selves."
--Time "Laymon provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as
a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against
American moral rot."
--Entertainment Weekly, Best of 2018 "[Laymon] unleashes his
incendiary truth-seeking voice on a memoir that leaves no stone
unturned in his examination of a life surrounded by poverty, sexual
violence, racism, obesity and gambling. But Heavy is also about the
lies family members tell each other and the heartache of growing up
in Mississippi the son of a complicated mother."
--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Best Southern Books of 2018
"Kiese Laymon is one of the most dazzling, inventive, affecting
essayists working today, and his memoir lives up to the dizzyingly
high expectations set for it. In Heavy, Laymon explores his
tumultuous relationship with his brilliant mother, what it meant to
grow up as a fiercely smart, rebellious black man in Mississippi,
and his trouble with addiction in various forms. Laymon is fearless
in his willingness to go to the darkest, the most tender, the most
raw spaces of his life, and of our shared lives in the fragile
experiment that is America. His writing will shock and comfort you,
make you realize you are not alone, and stun you with its insights
about desire, need, and love."
--Nylon.com
"Dealing with family secrets, eating disorders, sexual violence,
and other personal struggles, Heavy is heavy indeed--but it's also
lofty and elevating."
--Electric Literature, Best Nonfiction of 2018 "Weight is both
unavoidably corporeal and a load-bearing metaphor in this
novelist-essayist's sharp and (self-) lacerating memoir, addressed
to the single teen-mom-turned-professor who raised him to become
exceptional, sometimes using a belt ... Race, class, and the scars
of sexual violence are front-and-center, a constant pressure and
threat, but its effects are registered at ground level, a space too
complex and for pop sociology."
--Vulture "Kiese Laymon's intense, layered Heavy is a provocatively
personal look at racism and oppression in America ... Laymon's
prose positively sings, helped by the humanity and humor he brings
to this astonishing memoir."
--The A.V. Club "Laymon provocatively meditates on his trauma
growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic
against American moral rot."
--EntertainmentWeekly.com "In Heavy, Laymon has written a memoir
that feels like a body blow ... Through it all, Laymon's love for
language and words drives his intellectual curiosity. Laymon's
reputation as a writer grows with each piece he produces. Heavy
will cement his reputation as one of America's best writers."
--Signature Reads "Stylish and complex ... Laymon convincingly
conveys that difficult times can be overcome with humor and
self-love, as he makes readers confront their own fears and
insecurities."
--Publishers Weekly, starred "A challenging memoir about
black-white relations, income inequality, mother-son dynamics,
Mississippi byways, lack of personal self-control, education from
kindergarten through graduate school, and so much more. Laymon
skillfully couches his provocative subject matter in language that
is pyrotechnic and unmistakably his own ... Far more than just the
physical aspect, the weight he carries also derives from the
burdens placed on him by a racist society, by his mother and his
loving grandmother, and even by himself. At times, the author
examines his complicated romantic and sexual relationships, and he
also delves insightfully into politics, literature, feminism, and
injustice, among other topics. A dynamic memoir that is unsettling
in all the best ways."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred "Spectacular ... So artfully crafted,
miraculously personal, and continuously disarming, this is, at its
essence, powerful writing about the power of writing."
--Booklist, starred
"Oh my god. Heavy is astonishing. Difficult. Intense. Layered. Wow.
Just wow."
-Roxane Gay, author of Hunger "What I have always loved about Kiese
Laymon is that he is as beautiful a person as he is a writer. What
he manages to do in the space of a sentence is unparalleled, and
that's because no one else practices the art of revision as an act
of love quite like Kiese. He loves his mother, his grandmama,
Mississippi, black folks, his students, his peers, and anyone else
willing to embrace his love enough to give us this gorgeous memoir,
Heavy. This reckoning with trauma, terror, fear, sexual violence,
abuse, addiction, family, secrets, lies, truth, and the weight of
the nation and his body would be affecting in less capable hands,
but with Kiese at the helm it is nothing short of a modern classic.
These sentences that he so painstakingly crafted are some the most
arresting ever printed in the English language. Kiese's heart and
humor shine through, and we are blessed to have such raw humanity
rendered in prose that begs for repeat readings. We do not deserve
Heavy. We do not deserve Kiese. That he is generous enough to share
is testament to his commitment to helping us all heal.
-Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World
Watching "There are those rare writers in the world whose work
unearths the stories that have been buried in and around us for so
long. They force us to confront all that we would be rather not
see, and ask us to reckon with why we have failed to see it for so
long. Kiese Laymon is one such rare writer. Heavy is a memoir, yes,
but it is also a testament to a sort of truth and self-reflection
that is increasingly rare in our world today. If for some reason
you were not already convinced, there should no longer be any doubt
that Kiese Laymon is one of the important writers of our time."
-Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent "With Heavy, Laymon has
outlined the wretched shape of our relentless national lie with
duty and precision, breathing and pouring into it to shine the
light ever brighter on its contours and limits. Heavy is an
intimate excavation, a diagnosis, and a prescription for a cure for
the terrifying dishonesty of the American body politic. I did not
want to remember what I have found necessary to forget. Ready or
not, Heavy remembers for me, and for us all, with the exquisite
black southern precision of a post-soul blues. Its brilliance is in
its intimate and firm reminder that we are more than what has been
done to us by others and by this nation, and that we can and must
unburden ourselves as we move towards freedom. With Heavy, Laymon,
the chief blues scribe of our time, writes and plays us a path
through the weight of things."
-Zandria Robinson, author of This Ain't Chicago "Kiese Laymon's new
book is an emotional powerhouse. He fearlessly takes the reader
into the dark corners of his interior life. Wound, grief, and
enduring pain reside there. But this book is a love letter. And, as
we all know, love is a beautiful and funky experience. Thank you,
Kiese, for this gift."
-Eddie Glaude, author of Democracy in Black "Kiese Laymon has done
nothing less than write the autobiography of the first generation
of African-Americans born after the Civil Rights movements of the
1960s and the Black Power ethos of the 1970s. His story of
grappling with love and violence and language and our bodies is
this generation's story, and it is as moving and heartbreaking and
heartwarming as you would expect. And then some."
-Courtney Baker, author of Humane Insight "Heavy is an act of truth
telling unlike any other I can think of in American literature,
partly due to Laymon's uniquely gifted mind--his ability to pursue
the ways we lie to each other while also loving each other, or,
not, and the humility he brings to bear while doing so, this
consistently brings us back to life, to what matters in this world.
Heavy is a gift to us, if we can pick it up--a moral exercise and
an intimate history that is at the same time a story about
America."
--Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
"On the low, many in these United States of America imagine that to
be black means that whiteness, whether in its feigned supremacy or
brutal imaginings, should be the center of every black story. But
nah, that's meager. In Heavy, the Kiese Laymon remembers how people
who loved each other or might of loved each other, nearly shattered
everything around them with hurt and then struggled to piece it all
back together. Kiese crafts the most honest and intimate account of
growing up black and southern since Richard Wright's Black Boy.
Circumventing the myths about blackness, he writes something as
complex and fragile as who we is. An insider's look into the making
of a writer, Heavy is part memoir and part look into the books that
turned a kid into a story teller. Heavy invites us into a black
South that remembers that we loved each other through it all. In
"Nikki-Rosa," Nikki Giovanni wrote that 'black love is black
wealth.' This book is the weight of black love, and might we all be
wealthy by daring to open up to it."
--Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of A Question of Freedom "Heavy
heaves, sings, hums, and runs all night to make it clear that
there's an alternative, that Black history's first premise is
mutuality. That mutuality isn't perfect, ain't safe, it's
dangerous, in fact, and Heavy moves in a terrible and beautiful and
so gentle proximity to that--at crucial times our primary--danger,
the ones we love and who love us the most. I was with Kiese the
whole damn heavy-floating way, word for word in laughter and tears,
in recognition, refraction and revelation. But, way more than any
of those, sentence by sentence, I was with Kiese in thanks."
--Ed Pavlic, author of Another Kind of Madness "In Heavy, Kiese
Laymon asks how to survive in a body despite the many violences
that are inflicted upon it: the violence of racism, of misogyny, of
history -- the violence of a culture that treats the bodies of
black men with fear and suspicion more often than with tenderness
and attentive care. In prose that sears at the same time as it
soars, Kiese Laymon breaks the unbearable silence each of these
violences, in their peculiar cruelty, has imposed. Permeated with
humility, bravery, and a bold intersectional feminism, Heavy is a
triumph. I stand in solidarity with this book, and with its
writer."
-Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Other Side and The Reckonings "How
appropriate Kiese Laymon's stunning memoir is titled, Heavy. Not
only are the stains and hurt highlighted here, heavy, but also the
writer's capacity to revive graveyards of ghosts who haunt and
seemingly will continue to haunt the protagonist. Laymon is a
fearless writer, our writer, who's willing to expose and explore
his most vulnerable interiors so that we might get closer to our
truths. This is a southern book for backroads and cornbread, for
Cadillacs and collard greens, for big mamas and moonshine. Heavy is
full of our beautiful and ugly histories, and a declaration of how
we might seek redemption. The colorful and complicated characters
here speak a blues and poetry that is both nostalgic and familiar.
This is the book we need right now. We should all be thankful for
this ultramodern weighty testament of heartache, catharsis, and
utter brilliance."
--Derrick Harriell, author of Stripper in Wonderland and Ropes "You
do not just read Kiese Laymon's work. It does a reading of you
too--one that unburies the stories you thought you would never be
able to tell truthfully, and reminds you of your voice to tell
them. Heavy marks this quality in its highest definition yet.
Written with as much devastating poignance as a humor only the
Black South could inspire, Heavy asks readers not just to observe
Laymon's courageous journey to understand even the most frightening
complexities of life in an anti-Black, sexist, fatphobic society,
but to embark on it with him. In doing so, Laymon's gorgeous
wordsmithing moves us beyond simple binaries of pleasure and pain,
joy and trauma, toward a deeper love for communities too often
flattened into one dimension. Heavy is a book for the ages."
--Hari Ziyad, author of Black Boy Out of Time "Heavy is beautiful,
lyrical, painful, and really brave. It is both exigent and
timeless. Laymon's use of juxtaposition--of the political and
personal, the many stories of dishonesty and history, violence,
everything--is all-world."
--Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People
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