Heavy: An American Memoir

By Kiese Laymon

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'So beautifully written, so insightful, so thoughtful, so honest, so vulnerable, so intimate ... A gift' - Jesmyn Ward
'Wow. Just wow' - Roxane Gay
'Unflinchingly honest' - Reni Eddo-Lodge
'An act of truth-telling unlike any other I can think of' - Alexander Chee
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A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR
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The story of the black male experience in America you've never read before

Kiese Laymon grew 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 career as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, abuse, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing and ultimately gambling.

In Heavy, by attempting to name secrets and lies that he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few know how to love responsibly, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A defiant yet vulnerable memoir that Laymon started writing when he was eleven, Heavy is an insightful exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship and family.
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'Laymon's writing, as rich and elegant as mahogany, offers us comfort even as we grapple with his book's unflinching honesty ... Excellent' - New York Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526605733

Kiese Laymon

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others, and the bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. It was also chosen as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. He is the founder of the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable with reading, writing, revising, and sharing.

Reviews for Heavy

[jillrhudy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Heavy" is a stirring memoir by an exceptional black boy/man growing up in (and leaving) Mississippi that pulls no punches. At times absolutely brilliant (his first sexual experiences; relating to the Muslim experience in the aftermath of 9/11) and at times confusing, the memoir is addressed to Laymon's mother, with whom he has had a difficult relationship, to say the least. And he tells his mother the entire truth about who she is and what she's done. She is a genius. She is also horribly abusive, which given her son's extreme sensitivity, is difficult for the reader to process. She tries to protect him from "white folk" while crippling him emotionally.A chilling refrain throughout: "We laughed and laughed. . .until we didn't." A key word: happysad."Hunger" by Roxane Gay is a better memoir on the topic of black body image, but I have needed to confront and be challenged by a modern black man's perspective in print for a long time. Laymon describes in harrowing detail what it is like to try to live up to the expectations (roles?) of other black men and to live under the constant threat of police violence. I think the audiobook is a must and would clear up some of my confusion caused by some of the writing. Laymon lost me several times throughout the narratives. I need to hear Laymon say it all. Probably more than one hearing would be good.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"I wanted to write a lieI wanted that lie to be titillating.I wrote that lie.It was titillating.You would have loved it.I discovered nothing.You would have loved it.I started over and wrote what we hoped I'd forget."So begins this letter, memoir that Laymon writes for and to his mother. Growing up in Jackson. Mississippi, to a brilliant and difficult to understand mother, he struggles to understand his place in the world, in his family. A house filled with books, and a mother that alternately hugged him and punished him by beating him. He struggled with his weight, struggled with other people's opinion and his own blackness, his thoughts on sex. I am not black, I can read but empathise, but not really understand. Do know that this is an amazingly powerful book. I do know and can feel his anguish expressed so honestly in these pages. I do believe this is s book everyone, regardless of color or sex, should read.

[katiekrug · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This memoir is addressed to Laymon's mother, a brilliant and passionate but abusive woman who felt the need to toughen up her son through physical abuse to prepare him for the difficulties of being a black man in America. The relationship between mother and son is a fraught give-and-take and colors Laymon's every experience from childhood through to adulthood and his interactions with the world. His writing is powerful, and his story even more so. There is no neat ending here, but in wrestling with his history, Laymon has found a subject worthy of his talent.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Laymon writes tenderly of terrible things in this memoir written as an address to his mother, a woman who demanded excellence and also beat him savagely. The writing is painfully about involving sex, sexual abuse, his weight, his disordered eating, the racial expectations and threats he faces from teachers and others, and his addiction to gambling. A lot of times, I was reminded of Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—the book is full of lacunae, obvious failures to speak that testify to the depth of the pain of life.

[breic-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Laymon is black, and he's severely overweight. He also struggles with a gambling addiction and some minor kleptomania. That's not enough to make his story interesting. He tries to broaden the context, to be about blacks in America, and it is not at all convincing. At best, it looks like he is trying to make excuses. All the "lessons" he learns he promptly forgets (blaming other people), so there is hardly any real growth. To his credit, though, it does take some courage to tell his story so unflinchingly. The writing is very good, but the story isn't worth it. > "You let too many hands into that raw. There are things I want to say to you that white folk do not deserve to hear. I have a heart, Kie. I have a heart and a job. And even though you don't act like it, you do, too. You've got to be much more careful. White folk do not deserve to stick their nasty hands into our raw. Hiding from them and being excellent are actually the only ways for us to survive here."> I will want to starve. I will want to gorge. I will want to punish my black body because fetishizing and punishing black bodies are what we are trained to do well in America.> I finally understand revision, rereading, compassion, home training, imagination, and a love of black children are the greatest gifts any American can share with any child in this nation. You taught us to give our lives and work to the liberation of black children in this country.> After the beating [from his parents, for dating a white girl], you came to my bedroom. You told me I really needed to think about the difference between loving someone and loving how someone made me feel. You said if I liked how Abby Claremont made me feel, I really needed to ask myself why. You kept telling me I was beautiful. You said there were plenty of black girls in school and I would be safer "courting" one of them.> I waited in the parking lot for the bread truck to pull up. When the driver went in the store, I got out of the car, snatched as many loaves of wheat bread, white bread, hamburger buns, and cinnamon rolls as I could and took off back to my car. … I broke into vending machines on campus. I stole their Moon Pies, Hot Fries, Twix, and Grandma's Vanilla Sandwich Cremes. … I will attend Oberlin College. I will get caught stealing a frame for your birthday from the college bookstore.> "You think I'm hot?" "I think you're hot." We turned around and went back to the casino. You were there. I should have asked you if you wanted to come home with us. It took one hour to lose every cent of that ten thousand dollars. … I will say no when you ask me to wire you four thousand dollars tomorrow. I will punish myself for saying no by going to a casino and blowing my last four thousand dollars the day after tomorrow.> You begged me not to let those folk shoot me out the sky. I'm sorry for not listening to you. I didn't listen to one black person who loved me because listening to black folk who loved me brought me little pleasure. I'd fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I'd fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.> A teacher's job was to responsibly love the students in front of them. If I was doing my job, I had to find a way to love the wealthy white boys I taught with the same integrity with which I loved my black students, even if the constitution of that love differed. This wasn't easy because no matter how conscientious, radically curious, or politically active I encouraged Cole to be, teaching wealthy white boys like him meant I was being paid to really fortify Cole's power. … I believed in prison abolition. But I wasn't sure how fair it was to practice transformative justice on the cisgendered, heterosexual, white, rich male body of someone who'd been granted transformative justice since birth.

[brandyluther-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I find it hard to review this book because there are so many issues to consider that are presented. I do appreciate the honesty and naked truths he is so bold and brave to present. I do believe it presented many issues worth considering. It was not a light read but the perspective conveyed was refreshingly brazen and unashamed. I really feel like the author did an effective job of placing the reader in his shoes and experiencing the world as he had, which was a good take away. It personally left me feeling pensive and reflective about the world and the different machinations moving it and left me questioning how these may be made better, while also acknowledging different costs.

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How Laymon was able to get some much emotion into this memoir about his family and the impact of being black had on him is a feat. Not being from the south, not having to have my life reflect the honor of an entire race, knowing that what ever I did was going to meet with success, this was a real eyeopener as to why “Black Lives Matter.”

[jwrudn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. What a great book - moving, disturbing and inspiring. Best book I have read in some time.

[beth.clarke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"A skinny, scared, brilliant black man." Kiese Laymon's writing is raw, and he holds nothing back. Although I found his memoir sometimes hard to read, he is such talented a writer, that he pulled me right back into his story where there is hope. He shares about his many struggles in life. It's inspirational and an experience to read.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. People who know me IRL know that I am not an openly emotional person. I rarely cry and I hate books and movies that intentionally manipulate emotion from people. This cold bitch cried like a baby listening to this book as I sat in traffic on the 59th Street bridge. I was such a mess that the man in the car next to me rolled down his window and asked if I was okay. A NYC cab driver stuck on the bridge was worried about me – that is a lot of tears. There is nothing manipulative about Heavy, the pathos is absolutely authentic I am blown away by Laymon’s honesty, his talent, and his insight. Though his experience is uniquely his, sadly many of the horrors to which he bore witness or of which he was the victim happen to many people, and from those experiences comes nothing but sadness and violence and despair. Laymon found the drive to be a better person, a truly good person. Still a person in pain, a self-destructive person, but one who strives to acknowledge and overcome that which limits him. This book is sad, but it is not tragedy porn. It helped me to see gaps in my empathy, places where I was failing to see what it means to be Black in America, to be fat in America (which I do understand in part from personal experience), to be a big Black man in America. It also helped me see the intersectionality of oppression. Kiese’s connection to feminism is fascinating and instructive. The book also covers the power, of literature and the infinite number of forms love can take, some of which are woven together with abuse and pain and destruction but which still nourish. I tell you true, if the opening story doesn’t break your heart, you need to go to Oz and get one. This is an essential companion piece to Ta-Nahesi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

[ohernaes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kiese Laymon has many experiences I do not have, of racism growing up as a black boy in the US south, of severe over-eating, obesity, anorexia, physical abuse and gambling. So many and different from mine are these experiences that I believe that I cannot truly understand him. Yet, I must try or at least try to learn about them, why else would he write a memoir such as this. He writes well and the book is engaging. Recommended.

[booklove2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have been a fan of Mr. Laymon since the OG 'Long Division', so of course I had to read this memoir. ESPECIALLY after he recently won the MacArthur Genius Grant. I was very happy to see that! His mom and grandmama ensured that words were something he put a lot of work into. So of course this is good stuff. I wanted to listen to the audiobook as I read along in print, as Kiese reads it himself. I think it is essential to hear this in his own voice and he does a great job on the audiobook. He puts his whole heavy heart in this book. Thank you for sharing this with the world, Mr. Laymon.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this intense memoir, novelist and professor Kiese Laymon writes about his life as a Black child in Deep South and as an adult in the North. The narrative is addressed to his mercurial mother, with whom he is enmeshed in a confusing, overpowering relationship. As he tries to break free from her, he finds himself trapped in three impulse control disorders: first binging, then starving, then, finally, compulsive gambling. He also discusses how pervasive racism has affected him psychologically, emotionally, and physically.This book, which many have called "stunning," deserves to be read, and as Laymon suggests of other books, reread.

[amcheri-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I need to process this more but I can say I think anyone who has an opportunity to read this book should. Important, powerful, and beautifully written. Gorgeous prose.

[librolindsay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Even more stunning and devastating than I could have ever expected. I appreciated how he structured this collection around his struggles with his weight and addressing the book to his mother to really pick apart the way racism has impacted his life. Every bit as fantastic as the hype.

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's difficult to say anything new about this now classic memoir by a Black man writing to his mother, in love, appreciation, and fury. Laymon's path taken from Mississippi to the Ivy League, from eating as every metaphor for trying to get full of knowledge, hope, and escape and then getting trapped into obsession about BMI, is so stunningly described as to be almost unbelievable. It is barely three years old yet seems to have been with us forever. This voice needs to be raised and heard in every home in this country.

[dele2451 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A raw and intimate look at systemic racism in America, cyclical abuse, addiction, self-loathing, and the harsh realities of raising a child while trying to raise yourself out of poverty. Laymon's exploration of the lies people tell themselves (and others) to avoid confronting the pain required to improve was the most compelling for me.

[benkline · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is definitely a raw, powerful, emotional memoir. But its not written for me. Its not written for you. Its not written for any ONE person -- OTHER THAN -- Kiese's mother. Thats who this is written for.

It's definitely a story that will stick with you. In its complexity, and the way Laymon writes it. Its wonderfully written, and done with such style, and its written showing his true depth of emotion and the power behind his words.

But sadly, I keep feeling like its all lacking something. And I think its who he wrote it for. We don't get a name to his mother, we really don't get a face to his mother, and sadly, at the end, we don't get him coming to real grips with his mother.

She has damaged him from day one. And he knows this. But he only eludes to it, only beats around the bush, and is vague and pushing it away and around and not getting right down into it all. Like he knows the truth but doesn't want to fully speak it. The ending is also not a true ending, and thats a good thing, as well as a bad thing.

If theres any one thing I have come to learn about people, is that we don't just suddenly 'get better' or have amazing 'downward spirals' that someone can watch and react to. Its slow steps down and slow steps up with fall backs and progressions/regressions. You don't just hit rock bottom, you hit a couple of ledges along the way down. You also don't have a meteoric rise to the top. You don't say "I won't gamble anymore" and quit gambling. This isn't how it works. You can say it, and do it... for a little while. But then there's inevitably a setback, and then you might get better from that setback, or you might get worse.

So in that, with the ending, he is faithful. But, its also just an ending thats left ambiguous and kind of an "ending" because we reached the time that it needs to be an ending (ie. the current date). There's no true coming to terms and grips and recriminations for his mother and all of his and her actions.

He's obviously a very deep and intelligent man. But he never actually fully breaks down the ramifications of all that his mother does. He kind of does some talk here and there, but never a full "this is X and I know its X and that means X", its never how and why or what she did caused me to be like this or like that.

He's growing up in the South - Mississippi - during the 80s/90s/2000s. His mother grew up in the same area in the 60s/70s/80s, and his Grandmama grew up in the same area in the 50s/60s/70s. Its obviously a racial tense area and timeframe. BUT... he doesn't also see how his mother sets him up basically to have all of these problems throughout his life. Maybe its my own perspective being applied to his work? Or maybe he doesn't see it?

But his mother basically militarizes him from Day 1 against White People. And I capitalize that because 'They' are a definitive term and a definitive group, and basically an enemy throughout his life/memoir. And sadly, I don't think he ever sees it as anything other than that, and that this group could be anything other than that. Like he doesn't fully realize maybe, maybe, just maybe, not being antagonistic to White People all the time will HELP him in some ways. That maybe not all White People are the enemy/devil/evil. Maybe that they could help him. Or maybe that his mother's approach, Malachi Hunter's approach, or even his own approach, to White People, are actually HURTING him, rather than helping him, or preparing him, or safe-guarding him.

So I wish he did some more of reflecting, than just kind of platitude style things about toxic masculinity, feminism, black culture, surviving the South, and how White People are. He does talk about how this impacts him, but he never breaks it down to the atom level, which I think once he would do so, he could see the patterns better than just saying he saw the patterns. Because he lets us know he SEES the patterns, but doesn't fully express THE PATTERNS. If that makes any sense.


Also on a note of his gambling addiction, it was interesting to read and see the perspective that I see all the time. And ironically I was finishing the novel up and (primarily that section) while sitting on my breaks in a casino (working as a Table Games dealer). And this is something I see practically day in and day out at the casino. The 10$ last gasp. The ATM runs that occur over and over and over.

[nancyjcbs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I purchased Heavy quite a while ago but had not taken the opportunity to read it yet. During the protests seeking justice and an end to systematic racism more books about race were recommended. Since we're in a dual time of protest and pandemic I've had lots of time for long walks and introspection. I borrowed the audio version of Heavy and listened to Kiese read his words. It was powerful.Kiese is raised by his demanding and loving mother in Jackson, Mississippi. She is an unconventional college professor and is determined that her son live up to his potential. He becomes a talented writer and college professor at Vassar College. But it's not an easy journey. His life is filled with struggles with racism, an addiction to weight loss, gambling and a failure to sustain a loving relationship with himself.I was particularly moved by the last chapter as he outlines potentials for Blacks in America. The long term future can be promising or it could be devastating.

[larryerick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is not your everyday memoir. Hold on tight for the ride. Perhaps, I can best give my reaction to this book, by comparing it to other books I have read. First, and perhaps foremost for me personally, it reminded me almost immediately of T Kira Madden's memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Neither book spoke directly to my background or my demographic in any way, and yet both enthralled me with their naked frankness, their willingness to admit and deal with their own mistakes and vulnerabilities, and their incessantly engaging writing styles. Secondly, I thought of Ta-Nehisi Coates's letter (in book form) to his teenage son, Between the World and Me. In this book's case, it is mostly the author's missive to his mother. In both cases, they reflect in emotional, insightful ways to life as black person in a white people's country. As powerful as Between the World and Me was, I think this book speaks more clearly and persuasively, at least it did for me. Which brings me to the third book, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. As anyone who has read my review of that book knows, I thought DiAngelo missed badly a golden opportunity to make a case for why white Americans should better understand their privilege over blacks in America. There is a major section of this book that gives indelible credence to black complaints. Finally, as this book shifts gears, so does my recollection of past books I have read shift to another: Gabor Maté's book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. I'll let those who end up reading this book, learn for themselves why that book felt so closely tied to this one, but I will say for the record that the Maté book gave me a much deeper and broader understanding of human addiction well beyond the cliché view of drug and alcohol addictions most people have in mind. That insight allowed me to appreciate this book that much more for what it had to say. I will add that I have a desire to read this book again. I rarely reread books, and when I do, it is most likely because I just don't feel I got out of it everything out of it I want to get the first go-around. In this case, I would read this book again for its clarity, its passion, and its insight. Basically to recenter my thoughts.