Heavy by Kiese Laymon (review)

In his new and searingly honest memoir Heavy, Kiese Laymon interrogates what it means to be African-American, a son, and a man in our country. In pursuit of a way forward, he examines and exposes the lies told in pursuit of safety—lies that ultimately annihilate any chance of real safety or belonging—and suggests that the only freedom is through radical honesty.

From his first sentence, Laymon establishes his intention to set the record straight on a complicated and compelling personal narrative. He is uninterested in creating a false sense of progress or improvement. Rather, he is driven by the pursuit of truth, no matter how devastating it may be. His is a personal trajectory that runs parallel to America's long, harrowing, and violent history of white supremacy. Both histories prove difficult to contemplate, but over 241 pages we come to see that ignoring them means death for the author and our collective whole as a country. Laymon's truth-telling reveals itself for the revolutionary act that is, both personally and politically. His work is one of recovery in the truest sense: recovery of memory; recovery from trauma, history, and shame; and a hoped-for recovery from addictions of all stripes, including a debilitating eating disorder and exercise addiction that leave Laymon literally flat on the floor and physically debilitated by his late twenties.

Heavy mines the material of Laymon's life from youth until early middle age, a time when questions about childhood run headlong into questions about the future, including marriage and whether to have children or not. In Laymon's hands, the deeply private becomes relatable—as is our complicity in many of the traumas he exhumes. His scrutiny leaves the author no place to hide. In a way, this is the deal only a memoirist could make in return for exposing his treatment at the hands of others. Laymon's brutal candor risks much. It risks offending and alienating others, most significantly his mother and grandmother, and damaging his own reputation in a world that is anything but forgiving of black men's existence, much less their mistakes, no matter how minor. Many of the secrets Laymon uncovers impinge on the lives of family members, and some of that history is so painful, so relentlessly revealing, that this reader felt twinges of sympathy for those who did not choose to examine their life so publicly. An honest and uncompromising memoirist greatly one-ups the old threat and joke of fiction writers: "Careful, or I'll put you in my novel."

But the cost of concealing lies and living a split existence proves too steep for Laymon to keep burying the past. Heavy shows that keeping a tight reign on your secrets might give you the illusion of power when really it's the secrets that control you. Laymon painstakingly narrates that quicksilver transition from being in control to being controlled.

At Oberlin College, a life raft of a school after his gross mistreatment at Millsaps, he gains control over binge eating, successfully gets in shape, and gets the education he deserves. One can almost imagine the self-improvement montage depicting the writer as "a handsome, fine, together brother with lots of secrets" (161). Six years later, that momentary stay against disorder and chaos has morphed into full-blown anorexia and a punishing exercise regimen: "I sat on the floor knowing my body broke because I carried and created secrets that were way too heavy" (206). The same secrets he briefly masters leave him brittle and broken in the grip of addiction. Heavy is fittingly subtitled "An American Memoir." Not only is this a study and indictment of America's homegrown racism but also a confession of the secret that cuts across race, class, and gender: familial addiction.

Heavy will be of particular interest to students of literature and writing as it is also a book about what it means to be a writer and in particular a black writer. "The anxiety of influence," as Harold Bloom calls it, is never far from the Mississippi author's...