Instead, Laymon is drawn to an intimate exchange with the person who has most attempted to protect him, and who nevertheless pulls him into the gravity of her own self-harm. The text’s introduction couches the necessity of this address in a variety of “titillating” stories that Laymon wanted to write, but that ultimately “discovered nothing.” Didactic narrative modes in fiction and memoirs about racism that “center a something, a someone who wants us dead” but promise black America’s salvation through a combination of white sympathy and “a low carb diet” are insufficient. Years later, Heavy masterfully wields language to explore the part words play in constructing-and deconstructing-the weighty illogic of racism that attempts to render him speechless.Īlthough Heavy begins, “I did not want to write to you… I wanted to write an American memoir,” Laymon frames his story as a letter to his mother. A young Laymon must weather frustrated attempts to put these experiences into words under the tutelage of a beloved but abusive parent.

To treat this awareness as a source of authority, Laymon must also navigate the prevailing conclusion that his body is trying to destroy him, either due to the body’s mere existence in a white supremacist nation bent on obliterating African American men, or through the acts of self-harm, addiction, and negation the body manifests in order to counter its expectation of powerlessness.

Crucially, Heavy positions somatic awareness as a reference-point for generating the language to discuss trauma, failed love, and injustice. What is weight? In Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon suggests that it depends on whether you see excess or abundance flesh or a body baggage, or the story of a young man navigating a fractured relationship with his mother and his country.

Heavy and american memoir