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Review

“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 “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 “[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 “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 “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 “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 "[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 "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"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 “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. He carries his people with a sweetness and fullness of heart that allows them to shine in three dimensions, allowed to be ugly and complicated and beloved and human. The abundance of Heavy is going to be a gift for many hurting hearts, in our time and beyond.” –Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches  "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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About the Author

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is also the author of the memoir Heavy.

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Product details

Paperback: 256 pages

Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (March 5, 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1501125664

ISBN-13: 978-1501125669

Product Dimensions:

5.5 x 1 x 8.4 inches

Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.9 out of 5 stars

95 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#5,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Finished Heavy moments ago. I heard Kiese Laymon on NPR, and the second I heard he was from Mississippi, I pulled over and ordered, not only Heavy, but all of his books. I am so glad I was listening to NPR last week because I NEEDED this book in my life. As a Mississippian who left after college but whose family (including mom) still treads water in the state, this book gave voice to the pain, the struggles, the cycles of violence and desperation and waning hopelessness that influence just about every decision made by people in Mississippi. Many times I have been asked to describe the psychology of Mississippi and its people, but I could never explain it. Mr. Laymon captures that psychology and he paints literary pictures that are so real and so emotional that many times I had to take a break and remind myself to breathe because this book takes your breath away.The way in which he wrote this book to his mother, and started from his early childhood forward, created a crescendo of emotions. My heart rate increased as I moved along his life, and I kept thinking, "Oh no, something terrible will happen." Only to get to the end and realize the "something terrible" was the metamorphosis of the relationships between the characters -- Laymon and his mom, Laymon and his grandmother, Laymon and his body, which ingenuously is a prominent character of his memoir. There are so many layers to this memoir, and rarely do I read a book in two days only to sit down to read it again. Not only am I going to re-read this book, but I am going to have my husband, son and daughter read this book as they often ask about Mississippi and its influence on me as a woman, mom, etc.Poignant, personal, heavy. Deals with issues that are not fun but that are too common in so many of our lives and Laymon recounts these serious events and experiences honestly and yet respectfully (positive there is a better way to describe it). Who would I recommend read this book? Moms, sons, daughters and dads, people who deal with body issues, broken people, hurt people, the people who love broken and hurt people, anyone who wants more insight into the sustaining impact of racism, oppression, and America's unwillingness to confront the past in truth and frankness. Outstanding book.

Heavy it is in more ways than one. Kiese Laymon’s intense memoir HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR. What the author started writing as a child sitting on his grammama’s front porch in Mississippi as a young boy, he finishes as an educated young man, sharing his deepest, darkest secrets, which he withheld from those he loved, unleashing them finally, with the hopes of not only becoming the writer he was meant to be, but to stop living lies that went back and forth between him and his mom.In the book, Kiese 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.Kiese writes with such depth, with such poetry, and there is a beautiful bond with his friends that will lift you right up. I love, love, love his way with words. Don’t read this book quickly as you are apt to miss something. And, savor everything that his grandmother has to say. She is as wise as they come.

Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese. Laymon (Scribner, 2018) is a complexly layered book. On its face it is the memories of a man who began his life as a poor child in Mississippi and how his experiences accumulated to make him the man, the author and the professor he is today. It is a journey in search of authentic love, authentic connections, authentic grasp of self in spite of the cultural and historic forces that would deprive him of all three.It is a brutal story. It is a tender story.A memoir is by definition a recounting of events the author lived through. It is told from the perspective of the author. In all human stories there are other people involved, other points of view, other memories of the same events seen through other eyes. Precisely because it is a memoir, a telling of the author’s experience, it must be taken seriously. In Laymon’s case I think it especially important to listen carefully and respect his voice, for it is the voice of one man who is part of a subset of Americans who are seldom taken seriously, seldom listened to carefully, seldom taken into account in the national conversation. Voices like Kiese Laymon are often dismissed, belittled, ignored.Some readers will be appalled at some of the experiences Laymon recounts. Others may dismiss events as exaggerated or from the past, things that wold not take place today. Others will read some parts of the book and walk away smug in their belief that Blacks are the architects of fractured Black families; there is nothing here that remotely supports such a reading of life in America—Black or white.Throughout the book Laymon is speaking to his mother, telling her his becoming. His experience is that none of the significant people in his life tell the truth about things that matter most deeply. (I intentionally am not providing any examples from the book: I don’t know how to give examples here without taking away from the power of Laymon’s voice. I encourage—nay, urge—you to engage him unfiltered through a reviewer.) He openly struggles with understanding and telling the truth. His struggle is one with which anyone who has successfully transitioned from adolescence to adulthood can identify.I said earlier that this Memoir is a layered book. It is easy to see it as one man’s story. It is easy to begin to identify ones self in this story. It is less easy to see this story as an engagement of one man with main stream America. Somewhere in the last third of the book it dawned on me that the story can be read from the perspective that the author’s mother represents American culture, that she is a stand in for the ways the culture did and did not nurture him. There are no good words to describe how we are nurtured/formed, given a hand up or kicked down in American life by the systemic way the culture works. I know that American culture nurtured me differently from Keise Laymon simply because I come from an educated, privileged white family and Keise Laymon is a descendant of enslaved people. Even acquiring an education was more difficult for him than for me by an order of magnitude. The difficulty is the result of institutionalized white male supremacy fallacies, and privilege. It has nothing to do with any Black innate shortcoming. Race is a social construct; it has no basis in biology. If you doubt that assertion or are uncomfortable with it, then I urge you to read the scientific literature that is the basis for that statement. (Google “the biological basis of race” and read the first half dozen hits that come up. For starters.)Finally, the author has written a love letter to America. He is inviting all of us—privileged and ”other” (See Toni Morrison’s (The Origin of Other, Harvard University Press, 2017) to engage in a conversation about our shared 400 year history.And he invites a conversation about our shared future. This is a most timely, urgent conversation. Who are we? What kind of a people do we want to be? What choices can we make that will strengthen our chances of leaving a livable future for our children and grandchildren. What choices will foul the Eagles nest?I urge you to read this book during this holiday season, at least once, and to write your reactions to his Memoir and share it with someone important to you. Laymon is a voice to take seriously.November 23, 2018

This book is good. It’s one of those that leaves you in physical pain from the heartbreak but you love every page. This memoir tells the life from a black son to a black mother and it’s gorgeous. He ties in abuse and violence to his weight and how American violence reacts to black bodies. It wasn’t what I thought it would be when I picked it up but I’m glad because it was so much more. Every word had meaning.

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