Subtitled An American Memoir, Heavy is written as a letter to Laymon's mother — a brilliant, demanding Jackson, Mississippi, political scientist who raised him with books, expectations, and beatings. Laymon weighs 208 pounds at eleven and more than three hundred as a grown man; he starves and exercises his way down a hundred and thirty pounds and gains it back; and he sets the body's ledger alongside the others he has kept — childhood sexual abuse, a college suspension, gambling, teaching, writing, and the lies he and his mother agreed to live inside. The book refuses both the triumph narrative and self-pity: its subject is what America, family, and Laymon himself have done to one Black body, and what telling the truth about it costs. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and was a Kirkus Prize finalist.
Author: Kiese Laymon · Original publisher: Scribner (New York), 2018
