Heavy memoir12/31/2023 ![]() Laymon lamented that his book has not done much in helping his familial relationships especially due to its popularity. Laymon noted that though his mother originally loved the idea of a memoir about her and her son’s lives, after the book unexpectedly rose in popularity, she was not happy with such a large audience knowing deeply personal details about her life. We said ‘I love you’ every time we got off the phone, but there was no proof that we loved each other at all,” Laymon said. “I wrote Heavy to my mama because we were not healthy. Prior to writing Heavy, Laymon and his mother’s relationship was in a state of disrepair, according to Laymon. It often uses words such as “you” and “we” to signal that Laymon is speaking to his mother, telling a story and reminiscing over what their relationship meant to him. “The problem, in my part of the world, is that we are horrific at justly loving people, places, politics, and memories we say we love.”Īt its heart, Heavy is a letter to Laymon’s mother, he said. “One of the problems in my part of the country is not that we fail to get along with people and parties and politics by which we disagree,” Laymon said. The author said that it also offered him a chance to reflect on society’s social ills. In writing the memoir, Laymon was able to come to terms with his past and who he has become, he said. ![]() Laymon, now an English professor at the University of Mississippi, focused his lecture on Heavy. “ is a coming-of-age tale about becoming a black man in America and … a story about becoming an artist, a story about becoming a best-selling writer in America,” Ards said. After highlighting the 50th anniversary of BC’s Black Studies program and lauding the new African and African Diaspora Studies major, Ards gave a brief overview of Laymon and his work.Ī black writer from Mississippi, Laymon wrote the award-winning memoir Heavy and the “experimental” novel Long Division, in addition to a collection of essays, such as How to Kill Yourself and Others Slowly in America. The evening began with an introduction from Angela Ards, associate professor of African-American and contemporary American literature. Students, professors, and alumni filled Gasson Hall’s Irish Room, eager to hear Laymon discuss his journey to a successful career in writing. "You won't be able to put down?It is 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" (The Atlantic).Boston College’s Lowell Lecture Series continued with a talk given by Kiese Laymon, famous author and winner of the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, on Wednesday night. "A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay's memoir Hunger" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. Heavy is a "gorgeous, gutting?generous" (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon's experiences with abuse. ![]() From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir?winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize?genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon "provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot" (Entertainment Weekly). ![]() *Named a Best Book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics*
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