Kiese’s Heavy – A Memoir of Mass
Reading Kiese Laymon‘s autobiographical memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, was a searing experience. Laymon writes with extraordinary and unusual intensity. This is a powerful book, well worthy of the many awards it received. It is also a complex work, crafted and shaped by an extremely skilled writer who knows how to tell a story.
Laymon, now a professor at Rice University, writes at the border between non-fiction and literature. How does one describe the complexity of a Mississippi childhood impossible to categorize? Beaten regularly, loved dearly, and brilliant amid diffidence and trauma, Laymon navigates Blackness, poverty and agency with a candor that can bring the reader up short. He is unapologetic, yet knows that apologies might be welcome. Central to the narrative and the man’s life is his mother. Laymon’s mom is a Black woman with a graduate degree who has a difficult life. She is a marginalized academic and problematic (to put it mildly) partners. Most importantly to Laymon, she has great aspirations for her son. She is also controlling and violent. The book is addressed to her, yet also to us.
Multiple threads emerge, knotting and unbinding, through the narrative. Weight is the most obvious theme, for Laymon was a very large child. Later, as he moves from college into graduate school, he controls his weight to the point of anorexia. He is both trapped and empowered by his body. Race, similarly, is ever present, as are the ways that others and Laymon see himself. Sometimes we learn more about him through the comments of friends. There are no reliable narrators here, for everyone’s consciousness is shaped, if not distorted. Nonetheless, we come to know Laymon from internal and external clues. My respect for him, present from the beginning of the book, grows into something more than admiration. The skill with which Laymon layers and peels away in the narrative is stunning.
The prose is beautiful.
Heavy well deserves its place of prominence.
David Potash
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