Kiese Laymon has written a memoir that can scald your heart - a gifted son with a loving, accomplished mother who inspires and drives him and yet abused and burdened him. His book shows the way. Heavy, a memoir by Kiese Laymon, is about the life of a young man and the challenges he faces as he develops into an adult. The novel follows Laymon through his family’s struggle through poverty, and his personal struggle with education, addiction, relationships, and being a black man in modern society. “At once tender and explosive, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy is a growing-up story laden with an unusual candor. The book is stark, beautiful, challenging, and refreshing. Laymon explores abuse, love, violence, addiction, gender, and race without ever veering into the realm of the titillating or dehumanizing.
Heavy An American Memoir PDF is a historical story of the black male experience in America you’ve never read before. In Heavy An American Memoir, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi.
About The Heavy Kiese Laymon PDF Book
The kiese laymon heavy pdf that is a force for radical honesty, sincerity and reckoning in society. Kiese Laymon shares what it was like to grow up in a body he never felt comfortable in, going to school in the deep South, where racial inequality was still more than prevalent, it was a way of life that he had to survive on a daily basis, and where his mother loved him something fierce but her struggle also meant that her anger was not contained.
A brilliant and harrowing memoir about growing up black in America. In a roughly chronological fashion, Kiese Laymon details his coming of age in Mississippi, his college years, and his job as a professor at Vassar College. As a child, he dealt with physical/sexual abuse, and throughout his life he dealt with persistent racism that damaged his body and his relationships. With a consistent overarching focus on structural racism, Laymon hones in on two salient aspects of his life in Heavy: his complicated, fraught, and deep relationship with his mother, and the disordered eating and body image issues he faced for years and years. Laymon’s writing about these two areas invites us to think and to feel about several pressing, heartrending topics, such as the ways that we replicate the abusive relationship styles modeled to us by our country and our elders, as well as how marginalized people use our bodies to cope with or block out discrimination. Laymon is intelligent, eloquent, and raw. The comparisons to Roxane Gay are most definitely warranted.
I most loved Heavy for how Laymon speaks truth to power. He writes about how the system (e.g., the United States, higher education within the United States) is rigged against people of color – especially black and brown people – with passion and poignancy. As someone in academia, I felt both inspired and saddened reading Laymon’s revelations about his time in the academy, inspired by his courage and saddened that he and so many others suffer. I also appreciated Laymon’s willingness to admit to his own shortcomings, such as how he has failed some students and committed errors in his relationships.
Overall, a moving memoir I would recommend to fans of the genre and those interested in race, body image/disordered eating, and parent/child dynamics. There were a few places where I felt like certain things could have been more explicitly addressed (e.g., so how did the recovery or lack thereof from disordered eating and gambling happen? how did he feel about his mother when certain things happened?) but that’s just my personal preference. Looking forward to reading more of Laymon’s work.
Laymon tells the story of his body – and how his relationship to his body is influenced by his difficult relationship to his mother. The way he grounds his experiences in the way his body reacted to them added a layer to this memoir that I appreciated immensely. Written in second person narration addressing his mum, Laymon lays it all bare for the world to see. Especially the first and last chapters really drove home how incredible his craft is and how deep the cuts his life made are. I found the book near unbearable in the claustrophobia of the unfairness of it all: the unfairness of racism, of poverty, of eating disorder, of addiction. The book is this successful because it is written for black people rather than about black people – a point Laymon makes at various points throughout the book, something he learned from his mother and his own mistakes.
Laymon centers Heavy on his close bond with his single mother, and from that viewpoint he writes succinctly about body image, Blackness, masculinity, trauma, language, education, addiction, and so much more. The memoir is divided into four parts, each with four sections, all addressed to Laymon’s mother, a college professor who struggled to care for herself as she pushed her son to be his best. Laymon is talented at capturing a person’s strengths as well as their flaws, including his own, and his prose is rhythmic and full of memorable lines.
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.
Heavy Kiese Laymon Pdf
Following the author’s life from his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, to his teaching position at Vassar College, Kiese Laymon’s memoir considers what it means to grow up Black, male, and heavy in America. Laymon centers Heavy on his close bond with his single mother, and from that viewpoint he writes succinctly about body image, Blackness, masculinity, trauma, language, education, addiction, and so much more. The memoir is divided into four parts, each with four sections, all addressed to Laymon’s mother, a college professor who struggled to care for herself as she pushed her son to be his best. Laymon is talented at capturing a person’s strengths as well as their flaws, including his own, and his prose is rhythmic and full of memorable lines.
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.
In this book, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing 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 trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.
Heavy Kiese
A defiant yet vulnerable memoir that Laymon started writing when he was 11, Heavy is an insightful exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship and family.
Once every several years I get hit in the face and heart and soul with a book that overrides the electrical circuiting in my brain. HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR by Kiese Laymon is that cerebrum hijacker. It is one of the most vital pieces of nonfiction I’ve encountered, full of the productive personal and political truth telling we seek out in stories. Whenever I think of the bravery, sincerity, and honesty living in these pages, my heart walls swell and cave under the pressure as my mind yells Now you! I will preface this review by saying that reading HEAVY is not easy. It is hard work dealing with hard subjects and hard truths. It is a challenging exercise in confrontation and discomfort, but rewarding in its goodness. It leaves you happy/sad, all-around tender, and wanting to hug your loved ones.
In HEAVY, Laymon addresses the book to his academically militant mother who expected excellence in all ways in order to make living as a Black man in the South as undamaging as possible. She believed intelligence conveyed through the Queen’s English could free him from circumstance. Bare on these pages are the messiness of parenting, and the internalized consequences of being a product of that parenting. Through this, Laymon chronicles his weight, lending a physical context to his emotional state. As he gets older, his weight becomes a fixation that grows toxic as the burden of secrets and lies around addiction, sexual abuse, and more fester to become caustic, malignant things that ruin relationships of all kinds and almost end him.
In another sense, Laymon addresses the book to America and the systemic oppression and racism that shaped his experiences with poverty and violence. In recounting his upbringing in Mississippi, his college days, and becoming a professor, he conveys the interactions that contextualize navigating the world as a Black man.
Heavy Kiese Laymon Quotes
Laymon is a formidable sentence creator. His language is lyrical with a style and tone all his own. His distinct manner of expressing emotions and discounted feelings makes the previously indescribable vibrant and accessible: we all get “bubble guts” from anxiety; “laugh until we don’t”; and fake a yawn to cover up sincere expression when tears flood our eyes. With these he provided me a new vocabulary as I realized that I did these things too, that these particular types of shame were not individual but universal.
Heavy Kiese Laymon Quotes
Two central themes of HEAVY are revision and rereading, which resonate deeply with me, as one of my favorite pleasures as a reader is revisiting a favorite text two, three, or even five times. I’ve read this book thrice, listened to the audio about twice as much, and still revel in finding new and different things to experience, brush up against, learn, and feel each time. It’s an honor to read these words, listen to them, be swept up in their heft, and feel shattered only to be pieced back together wobblier but stronger with the sheer force of the love hiding between the lines.
HEAVY came in like a tornado and unearthed portions of the past I’ve buried in Do Not Open folders of my brain, and forced me to hold a mirror up to myself and my relationships. It’s these singular practices that not a lot of memoirs do. Few foster intentional personal introspection like HEAVY, and that is why I strongly feel it is so important. It is not a passive reading experience, but rather a journey with Laymon to uncover those deep, dark, dirty truths staring right at us screaming for reckoning.