Heavy

Heavy is Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir. It won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. Earning praise from Alice Walker, The Boston Globe, NPR, Time, and The Paris Review, Heavy acknowledges that “we’ve arrived at the point we have as a country in part because of lies we’ve told ourselves about what America means” (Abdurraquib, Hanif. “Heavy.” 4 Columns, 10/12/2018, http://4columns.org/abdurraqib-hanif/heavy). This guide refers to the 2018 Scribner edition.

Plot Summary

Heavy starts with a refusal. Laymon says in his book’s first pages that he will not write the palatable, uplifting “American memoir” that an unnamed “you” wants him to write. That “you” turns out to be Laymon’s mother, and the rest of the book is addressed to her. Laymon’s mother was a brilliant and dedicated professor who encouraged Laymon to read and write, but often beat him and leaned on him for emotional support a child could not provide. Their complicated relationship, and the lies they have to tell to get through their lives, underpin Laymon’s memoir.

Laymon begins his story in Jackson, Mississippi, where he spent most of his childhood. At home and at neighbors’ houses, Laymon experiences and witnesses sexual violence: a babysitter abuses him, and he sees older boys raping girls and younger boys. His mother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend is violent, too. Laymon can’t talk about any of this with his mother. Instead, he turns his grief and rage on himself, using food to force down his feelings. He feels deeply not only his own pain, but the pain of the women around him. Even as a child, he has a deep awareness of how the lines of oppression run: men are taught to hurt women, white are people taught to hurt black people, adults are taught to hurt children, and straight people are taught to hurt gay people.

As Laymon grows up, he gets heavier and heavier as he confronts the racism that surrounds him. His beloved grandmother has to do white people’s dirty work to get by; his white teachers and schoolmates judge and underestimate him and his black friends; his mother, fearful, teaches him to avoid white violence by using scrupulously “correct” white-coded language. Language, joyful or suppressed, becomes a major theme of Laymon’s life. His friend LaThon, finding delight in a dry vocabulary list, expresses the power of words in Laymon’s life when he coins the phrase “black abundance”—a phrase that Laymon will return to as an expression of that which he loves in himself, in spite of having been taught self-hate.

Laymon’s survival, he finds, depends on his ability to present a “respectable” face, and his fatness makes his blackness even less acceptable to the white world he has to deal with. In college, racist students target him and his girlfriend after he starts writing for the school newspaper, and he develops a new eating disorder. Rather than binging, he begins to starve and overexercise, and he gets thinner and thinner. He’s expelled from his first college on racist grounds and forced to transfer, and like his mother he becomes a successful academic. All the while, he’s tormented by self-hatred and the necessity of choking back the truth to survive. He becomes an English professor at Vassar (again encountering persistent racism even from his supposedly progressive colleagues), and his eating disorder gets out of control. Meanwhile, his mother borrows more and more money from him, and he discovers that she’s developed a gambling addiction. At last, he pushes his body past its limits, severely injures his leg, and regains all the weight he lost. Then he, too, develops a gambling addiction. He and his mother find themselves in the same casinos, pretending not to see each other.

At last, Laymon confronts his mother in a casino hotel room. He tries to talk to her about their shared past, and she lashes out at him; Laymon gently persists, asking that they just stop lying and tell the truth about what they’ve seen and experienced. The two reach a fragile place of real communication—a connection that Laymon finds both profound and tenuous. Laymon ends his book with hopeful (and tragic) predictions: that some injuries—to himself and to black people generally—will never be healed, but that he will love himself, tell the truth, and stop trying to make himself disappear. Then again, he says, he might fall back into the pattern of lies that Americans are so rigorously trained in. The heaviness of Heavy is not just body-weight, but the weight of reality: the pain and the human solidity that come with speaking the truth.