Kiese Laymon’s Heavy is everything they say it is. I’ll start with some adjectives from Roxane Gay’s front-cover blurb: “astonishing. Difficult. Intense. Layered.” Some books – well-regarded, reviewed by smarter, better-qualified folks than me – are hard to write about. I can only add my voice to the chorus.
I think I’d already begun hearing about Laymon when I read an essay of his in Oxford American, which featured (if I remember) Outkast and his Grandmama. I was impressed then and I knew I needed to read this; I’m just sorry it’s taken me this long.
Laymon comes from Missisippi, raised by his mother and grandmother with infrequent contact with his father. He comes from financial insecurity, and a black* American experience that knows it is wildly insecure in the face of white America. His mother and father are both politically minded, and he has plenty of exposure to questions about race and racial (in)justice, but no exposure to the kinds of questions that bother him from a young age: questions about gender and sexuality and safety, consent, bodies, sexual violence, physical health, eating, economic insecurity, housing discrimination, memory, honesty and lies. He has to pursue these questions himself, and while Heavy is the story of his coming-of-age, it’s much more about figuring out how to interact with some of those questions. Truthfulness, bodies, relationships. How to love responsibly, as he puts it.
*I am following his use of the little-b black here even though that’s a change for me.
I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about black lies, black thighs, black loves, black laughs, black foods, black addictions, black stretch marks, black dollars, black words, black abuses, black blues, black belly buttons, black wins, black beens, black bends, black consent, black parents, or black children. I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir.
That’s his first paragraph. The book is written in the second person to a specific reader: his mother. The narrator and his mother love each other hard, but there is a lot of harm in their love. The reader gets to see young Kiese grow up, from age eleven or so (it jumps around a bit) to an adult professor earning tenure (in traumatizing fashion) at Vassar College. He keeps his reader up to date on body weight, as he tries to cope with his pain by eating his way up to 319 pounds and then by punishing his body with exercise and anorexia down to 150-something pounds. “I knew, and worried, about how much I weighed and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old.” The title is not only about body weight, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s about the heaviness of life and responsibility. “To white folk and the police, you will always be huge no matter how skinny you are,” his mother tells him.
I love how carefully he cares about words. His mother pushed him to speak a certain way, to keep him safe: no contractions when talking to white people and police. But he defends the unique language that he and his friends use in school, rebelling in their majority-white eighth grade year by using speech patterns that make sense differently. His mother, an academic, has pushed his writing and revision since childhood, but he’s choosing a different language than the one she pushes. “I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage.” WHEW. This book begins and ends with short sections titled respectively ‘Been’ and ‘Bend.’ He writes at the beginning, in ‘Been,’ to his mother: “I am writing a different book to you because books, for better and worse, are how we got here, and I am afraid of speaking any of this to your face.” There’s something powerful in writing down what’s that hard to say.
Heavy is artful, lyric, deathly serious, loving, stark. When Laymon becomes a young professor, he catalogs the ways in which he fails his students, and it’s absolutely raw and horrifying, and therefore brave. (I and most of us have failed worse.) It’s radical, in both senses, and I’m going to have to keep thinking about it. I didn’t do this book justice here. Go read it.
Rating: 8 miles.
Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, gender, memoir, nonfiction, race | Leave a comment »
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