This is a memoir filled with awareness and honesty I haven’t yet seen. I read it on the plane ride home and into the night after my return. 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. 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. But it is radical to tell that story from a place of compassion and love. 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. 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. There is a radical kind of vulnerability at the heart of Kiese Laymon’s new memoir, Heavy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |