First review - Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

A rhythmic, intimate, raw letter to his mother and America

I read Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir between ebook and audiobook. In this memoir, Laymon explores heaviness deeper than his weight. It is a reconciliation and continual question about his relationship with his ambitious, loving, and tough love giving mom, Blackness, sexual violence, writing, racism, patriarchy, and his body. It puts America’s violent history on display in a way you cannot unsee but want to keep hearing about.

It was powerful, intimate, and honest.

The first thing I noticed was that it was written to his mom, but not so much in a “Dear Mom” type of a way but in a second person “you”, his mom, type of way that wasn’t for “you”, the reader, but maybe it also was.

It starts with the Prologue, “Been”:

I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about black lies, black thighs, black loves, black laughs, black foods, black addictions, black stretch marks, black dollars, black words, black abuses, black blues, black belly buttons, black wins, black beens, black bends, black consent, black parents, or black children. I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir.

I wanted to write a lie.

As I mentioned in my welcome, while this newsletter is a way for me to review other memoirs, it’s also about what I will (or won’t) incorporate in mine, and I definitely think addressing it to my mom as “you”, is a technique I’ll use.

My memoir is about the relationship between my mom and me, mother and daughter, immigrant mother and daughter of immigrant mother, parentified daughter and parented mother. This clearly points in a lot of directions which makes this point of view so important.

Addressing his mom as “you”, truly set the tone by creating a specific intimacy between Kiese and his mom. When Laymon got away from scenes with his mother, when he focused in on his weight or sex or race, he so smoothly pulls her back in because her presence, her words, her rules, her violations, and her love, were central to those topics anyway.

As I navigate writing my memoir about my mom, which is a relationship full of love and hate and frustration and joy and confusion and entrapment, I appreciated Laymon not making his relationship with his mom only messy and ugly or only neat and tidy. This liminal space, gray area, or just plain reality of a mother-child relationship, was offered to the reader to experience the discomfort, awe, frustration, admiration, and disappointment he felt.

My memoir is basically a teenage hate letter turned into a healing adult love letter. But it’s really just a letter, a confession, a conversation I may not ever fully express to my mom.

Like Laymon, I don’t want to paint it only horribly or only beautifully. While I have my own bias about our relationship, I see it as a crystal where I turn it around and around to uncover each shiny and dull aspect (shout out to my client Jaclyn for this metaphor!) It is whole and it has holes. That’s what I want to express.

Another aspect of Laymon’s writing that I absolutely loved was how rhythmic it was:

Grandmama will laugh and laugh and laugh until she tells me she is sorry. I will not have the courage to ask her what she is apologizing for.

But I will know.

I will remember that l am your child. And, really, you are mine. And we are Grandmama's. And Grandmama is ours. You will tell me that you regret ever beating, manipulating, or demeaning me. You will tell me that you regret punishing yourself when you were lonely, shameful, and afraid.

It just kept pulling me in. I love repetition in writing that reveals, and I often employ it myself. While Laymon and I have different stories to tell and different rhythms to share, I love this parallel. When a memoir reads like a song, I wait for the chorus, I yearn for the bridge, I don’t want it to end…

While I’m nowhere near the end of my memoir, one thing I’ve noticed in essays I’ve written is I have a tendency to want to end them on perfect note, literally and figuratively, even if I say I don’t. I struggled with it in this essay about a demon goddess, who became and inside joke between my mom and me, and I was so grateful to the editor for pushing me toward an open-ending.

The last chapter of Heavy is called “Bend.” Laymon masters this as metaphor, as a non-conclusion conclusion about his relationship with his mom, systemic inequity, his weight, and the truth. It is something I’ll refer back to when I likely struggle with my ending.

It’s hard for me as a human to not integrate what is systemic, ancestral, and historical. Laymon did this through personal anecdotes and historic events, weaving them seamlessly throughout the memoir because it’s impossible to separate. I feel like I need to put more words on a page to see how I’ll go about this. However, Heavy, is definitely an inspiration.

Overall, I see Heavy as required reading for Americans and non-Americans alike - a way to disarm reductive perceptions of America by delving into Laymon’s relationships within it.

Tell me in the comments, what stuck out most to you from this review?