![]() "Laymon's memoir is a reckoning, pulling from his own experience growing up poor and black in Jackson, Mississippi, and tracking the most influential relationships, for better or worse, of his life: with his brilliant but struggling single mother, his loving grandma, his body and the ways he nurtures and punishes it, his education and creativity, and the white privilege that drives the world around him.with shrewd analysis, sharp wit, and great vulnerability - Laymon forces the reader to fully consider the effects of the nation's inability to reconcile its pride and ambition with its shameful history." "Weight is both unavoidably corporeal and a load-bearing metaphor in novelist-essayist Kiese Laymon's sharp, (self-)lacerating memoir, addressed to the single teen mom turned professor who raised him to become exceptional.a deeply personal book, where race, class, and the scars of sexual violence are front and center." a heartbreaking narrative on black bodies: how we hurt them, protect them, and try to heal them." Heavy is at once a paean to the Deep South, a condemnation of our fat-averse culture, and a brilliantly rendered memoir of growing up black, and bookish, and entangled in a family that is as challenging as it is grounding." Kiese Laymon is a star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful. "Heavy is a compelling record of American violence and family violence, and the wide, rutted embrace of family love. Laymon has created Gothic's not-so-distant black relative.for a book that has the author's disturbing childhood as a metaphor for African-Americans' pursuit of unattained happiness and perhaps unattainable racial freedom, Heavy is surprisingly light on its feet." Yet the defining elements of his art - cadence, dialogue, eye for detail, mordant wit - are firmly rooted in the African-American experience. "Stunning.Laymon is a gifted wordsmith born and educated in the land of Welty and Faulkner, and his use of language, character and sense of place put Heavy neatly into the storied Southern Gothic canon. Like the woman who raised him and the woman who raised her, he carries that weight, finding uplift from sorrow and shelter from the storms that batter black bodies." In a country both deserving of his love and hate, Laymon is distinctly American. He is a son of this nation whose soil is stained with the blood and sweat of his ancestors. ![]() Laymon subtitled his book, 'An American Memoir, ' and that's more than a grandiose proclamation. Heavy is comforting in its familiarity, yet exacting in its originality. Laymon lays out his life with startling introspection. the book thunders as an indictment of hope, a condemnation of anyone ever looking forward." ![]() ![]() " Heavy is one of the most important and intense books of the year because of the unyielding, profoundly original and utterly heartbreaking way it addresses and undermines expectations for what exactly it's like to possess and make use of a male black body in America. , in Laymon's multilayered word, heavy-packed with reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred yet are also pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in intimate grappling with black realities." dramatize a very different route to victory: the quest to forge a self by speaking hard truths, resisting exploitation, and absorbing with grace the cost of being black in America while struggling to live a life of virtue.You won't be able to put down, but not because breezy reading. " take on the important work of exposing the damage done to America, especially its black population, by the failure to confront the myths, half-truths, and lies at the foundation of the success stories that the nation worships. "With echoes of Roxane Gay and John Edgar Wideman, Laymon defiantly exposes the 'aches and changes' of growing up black in this raw, cathartic memoir reckoning with his turbulent Mississippi childhood, adolescent obesity, and the white gaze." This generous, searching book explores all the forces that can stop even the most buoyant hopes from ever leaving the ground." #HEAVY MEMOIR FULL#It's full of devotion and betrayal, euphoria and anguish, tender embraces and rough abuse.the liberation on offer doesn't feel light and unburdened it feels heavy like the title, and heavy like the truth.Salvation would feel too weightless-as if could forget who he is and where he has been. ![]() " Heavy is a gorgeous, gutting book that's fueled by candor yet freighted with ambivalence. ![]()
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