You say that you would rather write a lie and you know that she would rather have you write one. You write this book to your mother, telling her some of what made you and broke you, telling her some of where you’ve been and where you want to go. It’s something most people try to avoid, but it’s also something that I need to make it through the day. I think I thought it was one thing before I started the book, but as I worked on it, I began to embrace the soulfulness in heaviness. Heaviness evokes fear and desperation and, most importantly, a soulfulness. His work forces us to ask: What if everybody wrote like this to those who love and hurt them about the ways they have been loved and hurt? What would that do, and what would it look like? Until then, we’re just lucky that Laymon shows us a path toward reckoning. In conversation, he is genuine and open, turning questions back around to his interlocutor with sincere curiosity. The sounds of the highway occasionally made themselves heard in the background. Laymon and I spoke on the phone as he was making the twelve-hour drive from Oxford, Mississippi, to Tampa, Florida, to meet with booksellers. There’s a fable-like quality to the storytelling: it imparts its lessons in layers. He also discusses weight and bodies and the way all these things lend themselves to a heaviness that can be both physical and emotional. Laymon discusses violence in many forms, gambling and addiction, the treatment of black students at predominantly white institutions, and more. In Heavy, he takes the stuff of his life and renders it on the page.

Laymon’s work is known for its honesty and courage, as well as for the way he reckons with his own past and our collective national one. The first, Long Division, a novel, and the second, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, an essay collection, were both published in the summer of 2013-one in June and one in August. Heavy: An American Memoir is Kiese Laymon’s third book.

Heavy an american memoir kiese laymon