East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Heavy, an American memoir, Kiese Laymon

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Heavy

1074260023

Kiese Laymon

Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs

an American memoir

In this stylish and complex memoir, Laymon, an English professor at the University of Mississippi and novelist (Long Division), presents bittersweet episodes of being a chubby outsider in 1980s Mississippi. He worships his long-suffering, resourceful grandmother, who loves the land her relatives farmed for generations and has resigned herself to the fact of commonplace bigotry. Laymon laces the memoir with clever, ironic observations about secrets, sexual trauma, self-deception, and pure terror related to his family, race, Mississippi, friends, and a country that refuses to love him and his community. He becomes an educator and acknowledges the inadequacies in his own education, noting that his teachers "weren't being paid right. I knew they were expected to do work they were unprepared to start or finish." He also writes about living among white people, including a family for whom his grandmother did the laundry: "It ain't about making white folk feel what you feel," he quotes his grandmother. "It's about not feeling what they want you to feel." His evolution is remarkable, from a "hard-headed" troubled teen to an intellectually curious youth battling a college suspension for pilfering a library book to finally journeying to New York to become a much-admired professor and accomplished writer

Prologue: Been -- Boy man -- Black abundance -- Home worked -- Addict Americans -- Epilogue: Bend