Kiese Laymon: “I Didn’t Want to Be a Silent Survivor of Moral Failure Anymore”

There is a radical kind of vulnerability at the heart of Kiese Laymon’s new memoir, Heavy. It requires vulnerability to describe the nature and depth of one’s own pain to the person who caused it, but it is radical to move in allegiance with that person through sorrow and toward triumph and abundance. It requires vulnerability to name the myriad ways that violence gets absorbed by the body and spirit, and to grapple with the weight of carrying that violence in one body for so long. But it is radical to tell that story from a place of compassion and love.

Since Long Division (Laymon’s novel of time travel and confronting the contemporary evidence of historical wrongs) and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (his stirring 2013 essay collection about the traumas of coming of age as a black man in Mississippi), I have been a fan. Kiese and I share an editor at Scribner and, when I was in her office early this spring, I saw a galley of Heavy and shamelessly begged to have it. I read it on the plane ride home and into the night after my return. This is a memoir filled with awareness and honesty I haven’t yet seen. Kiese Laymon is not the only person to write about the particular peril facing the black body in America, but he is among the few men writing on this topic who are willing to wrestle so profoundly with the hard truth that race is not the only axis on which violence pivots. His critique of America is an intersectional and necessary one. This book is a love