Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University.
It’ll leave you shaken.Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. The stylistic change functions like a confrontation, a distilled epilogue of clarity. As Laymon moves toward his conclusion, the book shifts into more of a monologue, an artful, even theatrical meditation on what preceded it - on his confession.
The shattering quality of the writing never lets up. He supports so many relatives financially that he, at times, can barely keep himself afloat.
But he carries the reality of his childhood, the broken, complicated memories of his mother, every day. He’d eventually ascend to a professorship and, of course, the title of published author. (He weighed 300 pounds at one point, and would pass out in public.) The details are bleak, vivid: scrounging pizza slices from the trash while in college, watching his addict mother slotting away at a casino, from a distance. He conveys his agony, living through obesity and eating disorders, self-delusions and depression. Laymon meditates on the legacy of racial violence in his poor Mississippi hometown, the stains of blood and the ghosts of his ancestors all but visible as he traces the landscape.
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