I have dog-eared too many pages to close my copy of Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir. I found something noteworthy on almost every page ... This is a memoir to read and reread, as Laymon recommends readers do with all books of significance ... Dear white people, please read this memoir. Dear America, please read this book. 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.
The idea of excellence is a wire, sometimes barbed, often electrified, strung through nearly every page of Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy ... And part of 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 ... If this book succeeds as a thoughtful and hard-wrought examination of how a black man came into his own in a country determined to prevent that from happening, it’s because of the painstaking manner in which Laymon walks the reader through the various perils and costs of striving ... as Laymon’s excellent memoir suggests, a refusal to ask and answer difficult questions about ourselves and the people we love can be lethal.
Laymon examines the many obstacles to honesty and how they infect both public and private life. He weaves a rich...colloquial self-interrogation in the service of a larger interrogation of the country he lives in. It takes in how deeply and variously his body has been marked by shame and trauma, by sexual and physical abuse, by the compulsive soothings and punishings of food and starvation and obsessive exercise, his anorexia often invisible to others because of their inability to see a tall black man as in any way vulnerable ... Time bends and stretches as slow, detailed scenes are followed by delicate slips into an incantatory future tense, conveying a predictive cycle of complicity and hurt.
...Laymon, now a university writing professor himself, recalls the traumas of his Mississippi youth. He captures his confusion at being molested by his babysitter and at witnessing older boys abuse a girl he liked; at having no food in the house despite his mother’s brilliance; at being beaten and loved ferociously, often at the same time. His hungry mind and body grow, until, like a flipping switch, at college he’s compelled to shrink himself with a punishing combination of diet and exercise. And that’s barely the start of his life story thus far, with remembered moments in book-lined rooms and smoky casinos, conversations that leap from the page, the digits on a scale, and scrolling sentences ... So artfully crafted, miraculously personal, and continuously disarming, this is, at its essence, powerful writing about the power of writing.
[Laymon] 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 ... As Roxane Gay says of her own struggles with appetite in Hunger, Laymon alternates between reaching for a sense of power and reaching for a salve for powerlessness ... Unlike the American Memoir, our stories must be honest. That is how we get free.
Toward the end of the memoir, Kiese turns from his own experience to reflections on the victims of police brutality, such as Korryn Gaines and Tamir Rice... At first glance, the comparisons may seem tacked-on or belabored. After all, the memoir is about Laymon but his message is much larger. He’s not just writing to his mother and revealing himself to her. He’s also writing about his former and younger self, and bearing in mind of all the younger black people out there ... Heavy is not only a memoir but an exorcism of deeply embedded pains, and of missed opportunities to address those pains when they were inflicted ... [The book contains] many memorable and incredibly moving passages. Heavy is a nourishing, high-caloric book that is not meant to be consumed quickly. It is slow-paced, requiring one to savor each page. This is the portrait of a man who has lived and is not afraid to recognize his mistakes as well as those of other people. The particular kind of black male vulnerability Kiese Laymon has expressed is vital in our literary canon, and it should inspire others to follow.
Laymon’s blunt, incantatory sentences sketch these blurred boundaries [with his mother] ... Laymon forcefully demonstrates that eating disorders are gendered and raced, even as the ravages of self-abuse seem universal ... This is what the best serial life writing can do: revise personal history, revealing new truths each time a writer revisits a scene from his past. My highest praise for Heavy is that it is truly intersectional, in ways that Between the World and Me does not always attempt to be.
Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy is many things, all of them searing, brilliant, and unflinching in honesty, no matter what heartbreaks or difficulties rest at the end of the road his honesty carves out ... In Heavy, the story begins messy, and ends messy, and in between we learn why the mess was worth fighting through, and fighting for.
Quite simply, 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 ... Indeed, the book thunders as an indictment of hope, a condemnation of anyone ever looking forward.
Food inspires some of the most precise, textured writing in Heavy ... In general, [Laymon is] best when writing about his own feelings ... Although he talks often about the craft of writing, Laymon’s prose can be erratic, lurching between showy 'y’alls' and academese such as 'modes of memory'. There are many sententious and underdeveloped proclamations... Towards the end, when he includes his recipe for 'building the nation', he sounds merely pompous. His account of struggles to get tenure as a Vassar College professor belong to another book altogether ... [Laymon's] mother – labouring hard, making bad choices in men – remains unknowable, two-dimensional, a character in a gothic melodrama.
The stunning, aptly titled new memoir Heavy — Kiese Laymon's sweeping self-exploration about growing up in Mississippi in the 1980s — is a veritable cornucopia of black urban pathologies, set in an impoverished state that's become shorthand for American racism ... Although his cinematic journey is propelled by books and writing, a succession of invisible demons lurk at every turn ... 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.
In Heavy, [Laymon] writes with a fearless intimacy and bracing honesty, indicting the treatment of black people in the U.S. The book’s a high-water mark for both personal narrative and social criticism.
The barrage of trauma in Heavy is unrelenting: Laymon has to witness and survive countless incidents of violence and abuse—above all, the toxic vapors of white supremacy, which permeate the events in the book like mustard gas does a battlefield ... Heavy is a dark book, and the trauma that Laymon orbits is almost like a black hole...
Laymon’s sentences carry a bone-deep crackle of authenticity ... Alongside the heartbreak of these rhythmic, sensual sentences is a forceful, declarative honesty ... This is a generous conversation about the weight of racism, and the painful pressures placed on familial love. We’re lucky to eavesdrop.
It’s an astounding journey, not least for the ways it duplicates [Laymon’s] mother’s. Duplicates and complicates ... When at a certain point there is no more of the man to reduce, the narrative rushes brilliantly to its dismaying apotheosis...
Heavy lives up to its name. With extraordinary craft and pain, Kiese Laymon’s stark memoir chronicles one man’s scarring journey into adulthood, sentence after sentence piercing in its emotional intensity through all 241 pages. Heavy covers grim territory, but reads too intimately to look away ... Laymon’s personal story develops into a national indictment, one that cuts deep into the heart of American mythmaking ... Heavy is raw but controlled: a refined, warm, generously poetic literary work.
Laymon invites readers into his complicated relationship with his mother by addressing his deeply personal memoir to her directly; unfortunately, his mother remains a kind of shallow enigma through the entire book. However, his straightforward voice is rich with vivid detail that reads like poetry, and his ability to articulate his difficult experiences is unparalleled ... Intimate, bold, and reflective, Heavy is an uncomfortable, but necessary read.
...As an obese black youngster, the author had to learn to absorb cruelty not only because of his size, but also because of his dark skin. The relentlessness of his mother’s love—she expected academic and behavioral perfection and employed corporal punishment with a belt—shaped Laymon’s character in ways both obvious and subtle ... A dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways.
In this stylish and complex memoir, Laymon, an English professor at the University of Mississippi and novelist, presents bittersweet episodes of being a chubby outsider in 1980s Mississippi. He worships his long-suffering, resourceful grandmother, who loves the land her relatives farmed for generations and has resigned herself to the fact of commonplace bigotry. Laymon laces the memoir with clever, ironic observations about secrets, sexual trauma, self-deception, and pure terror related to his family, race, Mississippi, friends, and a country that refuses to love him and his community ... Laymon convincingly conveys that difficult times can be overcome with humor and self-love, as he makes readers confront their own fears and insecurities.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
