When I saw this as the Audible Book of the Year, I bit. I love it, but not sure if I like it yet, but DAMN, it moved me. it was gut wrenching, difficult to listen too, frustrating, infuriating, insightful, dynamic. tell him that he is a gift! Maybe, not tell him anything just look at him and smile, a genuine, caring, compassionate smile that will sink into him that not all white people are bad. tell him that words are power and also poison. Tell him that i believe it is possible to love and hate at the same time. I was also sad.I want to find this author, hug him, tell him I live my entire life in numbers on a scale.tell him that my 37 year old body is just now learning to love itself. good job at bringing it all to life and making my head swirl. I currently live 40 mins from Bloomington, IN and the parallels in the book made me shiver. angry that the adjustment to loving someone from there is hard for so many reasons I don’t understand, that this book brought a bit more light too. I was angry at the Mother’s I know from MS, the hatred, the angst, the truth. Being a white girl born on the completely opposite end of the Mississippi River, who recently fell in love with a poor (financially) white man born and raised in Jackson, MS I couldn’t put this book down. the authors voice was easy to listen to, easy to believe, easy to empathize with. This book was written in a style so unique, so mesmerizing, so enticing. I can't wait for 10 years from now when we'll all look back and remember when we became obsessed with Kiese Laymon.
Now, looking back, he unpacks all those years of collected trauma with an uncanny knack for saying the things that everyone thinks but no one else has the guts to say.
Later, as a graduate instructor, he would run 11 miles every day, eat only 800 calories, and pass out in public. When he was depressed in college, he would eat slices of old pizza from the dorm trash at night. From the time he was just a kid in Mississippi, Kiese Laymon has known exactly how much he weighs at any given moment, yo-yoing between 160 and 320 pounds. Read by the author and very much in his voice, Heavy is about a lot of things, including what happens to the body after trauma. Kiese Laymon's new memoir has left me totally speechless, but I'm going to try really hard to make words now so I can tell you how deeply I loved it. If you like memoirs where the author rips their heart out of their chest and leaves it beating on the floor, great, because we have so much to talk about.
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.Ī personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood - and continues through 25 years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. 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. 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. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion, and humiliation. In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a Black body, a Black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. 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
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and Kirkus Prize Finalist! Winner of the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction!