When we moved from apartments in West Jackson to our little house in the Queens, and eventually to North Jackson, I wanted people who dropped me off to think Beulah Beauford’s house belonged to us. Unlike us in our rented house, which we shared with thousands of books and two families of rats, Beulah Beauford and her husband owned her house. Just like the big boys, Dougie and me, all Layla ever wanted to do was float in the deep end.īeulah Beauford’s house, which sat deep in a North Jackson neighborhood next to ours, was only the second house I’d been in with new encyclopedias, two pantries filled with name-brand strawberry Pop-Tarts, and an in-ground pool. I was twelve years old, three years younger than Layla, who had the shiniest elbows, wettest eyes, and whitest Filas of any of us at Beulah Beauford’s house. You stood in a West Jackson classroom teaching black children how correct usage of the word “be” could save them from white folk while I knelt in North Jackson, preparing to steal the ID card of a fifteen-year-old black girl named Layla Weathersby. “You won’t be able to put down…It is 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). “A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger” ( Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks 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 is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” ( The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir-winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize-genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese 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). The strongest chapter recounts his childhood memories of spending time with his grandmother, accompanying her to the home of a white family she works for and listening to her insist that he is “heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy enough for.” Intimate, bold, and reflective, Heavy is an uncomfortable, but necessary read.*Named a Best Book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* However, his straightforward voice is rich with vivid detail that reads like poetry, and his ability to articulate his difficult experiences is unparalleled. Laymon invites readers into his complicated relationship with his mother by addressing his deeply personal memoir to her directly unfortunately, his mother remains a kind of shallow enigma through the entire book. He also tells of his exposure to sexual violence as a young person, his lifetime battle with weight that involves both gluttony and anorexia, his numerous encounters with racism, his discovery of writing, his pursuit of a career as a college professor in New York, and his destabilizing gambling habit as an adult. Laymon describes his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, living with an emotionally and physically abusive mother who enforces education by requiring him to write essays as well as spending time with his adoring grandmother who scrapes by with a number of part-time jobs. In Heavy, an unflinching account of growing up black, obese, and surrounded by violence, Kiese Laymon pursues truth despite its ugliness.
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