Race, politics, poverty, addiction, body issues, family, manhood, feminism, education-this book has it all. Laymon (Long Division; How to Slowly Kill Yourself) breaks down what it means to be a large black boy growing up in Mississippi, exploring the politics and policing of black male bodies, the heartache of black excellence and white privilege, the conflict that comes with loving an abusive parent and stepping away to save yourself. As beautiful as it is heartbreaking, this examination of language and place takes readers into Laymon's childhood as the son of a strong black woman who is unable to reconcile her child's pain with her own. Sexual abuse and anorexia are examined with care and attention, as are the emotions and consequences attached to these experiences. VERDICT This powerful, passionate narrative is hopeful but real, reading like a confessional with no sugarcoating. If you care about black lives and black experience, this is a must-read. Excellent for readers interested in family dynamics, race relations, higher education, and body awareness.-Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Often in his spectacular memoir, Laymon (Long Division, 2013) addresses ""you"": his mother, a scholar and university professor who gave him the ""gifts of reading, rereading, writing, and revision."" Laymon, now a university writing professor himself, recalls the traumas of his Mississippi youth. He captures his confusion at being molested by his babysitter and at witnessing older boys abuse a girl he liked; at having no food in the house despite his mother's brilliance; at being beaten and loved ferociously, often at the same time. His hungry mind and body grow, until, like a flipping switch, at college he's compelled to shrink himself with a punishing combination of diet and exercise. And that's barely the start of his life story thus far, with remembered moments in book-lined rooms and smoky casinos, conversations that leap from the page, the digits on a scale, and scrolling sentences. Laymon applies his book's title to his body and his memories; to his inheritance as a student, a teacher, a writer, an activist, a black man, and his mother's son but also to the weight of truth, and writing it. So artfully crafted, miraculously personal, and continuously disarming, this is, at its essence, powerful writing about the power of writing.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist

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 a pilfering a library book to finally journeying to New York to become a much-admired professor and accomplished writer. Laymon convincingly conveys that difficult times can be overcome with humor and self-love, as he makes readers confront their own fears and insecurities. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A challenging memoir about black-white relations, income inequality, mother-son dynamics, Mississippi byways, lack of personal self-control, education from kindergarten through graduate school, and so much more.Laymon (English and Creative Writing/Univ. of Mississippi; How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, 2013, etc.) skillfully couches his provocative subject matter in language that is pyrotechnic and unmistakably his own. He also uses an intriguing narrative form, directly addressing his divorced mother, a poverty-stricken single woman who became a political science professor at Jackson State University. As an obese black youngster, the author had to learn to absorb cruelty not only because of his size, but also because of his dark skin. The relentlessness of his mother's loveshe expected academic and behavioral perfection and employed corporal punishment with a beltshaped Laymon's character in ways both obvious and subtle. One of the main elements of the memoir is his resentment at white privilege and his techniques to counter it. "Every time you said my particular brand of hardheadedness and white Mississippian's brutal desire for black suffering were recipes for an early death, institutionalization, or incarceration, I knew you were right," writes the author. Of all the secondary themes, the impact of addictionfood, gambling, and drug use, but especially foodranks next. Laymon hated himself for topping 300 pounds as a teenager. Then he got fanatical with exercise and near starvation, dropping down to 170followed by a relapse of sorts as he began to approach 300 again. Far more than just the physical aspect, the weight he carries also derives from the burdens placed on him by a racist society, by his mother and his loving grandmother, and even by himself. At times, the author examines his complicated romantic and sexual relationships, and he also delves insightfully into politics, literature, feminism, and injustice, among other topics.A dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

the idea of excellence is a wire, sometimes barbed, often electrified, strung through nearly every page of Kiese Laymon's memoir, "Heavy." And that excellence is black: two middle-school boys killing time by taking their favorite vocabulary words - "erroneous," "abundance" - and, with the cool verve of Gwendolyn Brooks or Terrance Hayes, weaving them into insults to taunt their white classmates. "Everything about y'all is erroneous," one chants. "Every. Thang. This that black abundance. Y'all don't even know." This is black excellence as an artful shield, a defense against the searing gaze of classmates and teachers who, as young Laymon explains to his mother, "kept talking to us the way you told me white folk would talk to us if we weren't perfect, the way I saw white women at the mall and police talk to you whether you'd broken the law or not." That "you" is critical because Laymon's memoir is written as a direct address to his mother, a single parent who raised him in Mississippi while completing her postdoctoral work and passionately engaging in black activism with the hope of saving not just her family but the lives of black people throughout the state. (Again, excellence.) By directly addressing his mother and by portraying her as a nuanced and complicated character, Laymon illuminates the fierce love and deception that define his relationship to the woman who made him. This mother love is troubled and troubling. And part of the wonder of Laymon's book is his commitment to getting as close to the truth as possible, even when it means asking painful questions about what we owe the people who brought us into this world and, somehow, managed to keep us alive in it. In doing so, he compels us to consider the costs of an insistence on excellence as a means to an end and the only conceivable option for a black kid in America. The toll - physical, emotional - is painful to behold, especially for readers who have paid a similar price. Laymon's writing, as rich and elegant as mahogany, offers us comfort even as we grapple with his book's unflinching honesty. Just before he started eighth grade, the poor black Catholic school he'd been attending was closed down owing to a lack of funding. That's how Laymon and a handful of his friends end up at St. Richard Catholic School in Jackson, turning vocabulary words into gold and trying their best to avoid teachers who openly admit they find some of the new black students "gross." Well aware of the challenges this new school poses to her son, his mother warns him to "be twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this point on" because "being anything less will get you hell." If this book succeeds as a thoughtful and hard-wrought examination of how a black man came into his own in a country determined to prevent that from happening, it's because of the painstaking manner in which Laymon walks the reader through the various perils and costs of striving. When simply being black in America is often a taxing affair, the perception that the choice is between being black and excellent or being black and dead reveals just how cruel this country can be. To say nothing of how often "excellence" and "respectability" are tragically mistaken for each other. ft's heartbreaking to see how, again and again, that cruelty warps Laymon's relationship with his mother as she resorts to violence to keep her son in line. When she and Laymon are pulled over by a white policeman in Maryland for driving while black, the officer asks his mother if Laymon is her husband. It's a long-awaited dread come to fruition: the moment a black teenage boy begins to look, to casual white onlookers, like an adult. She quickly responds that her son is 15 and hands over her ID. As Laymon begins to lose his temper, his mother forcefully slaps him across the chest, telling him to be quiet and unclench his fists. As she well knows, any behavior less than excellent as determined by a white police officer at such a moment could be fatal. Later, when his mother finds out he has been having sex with a white girl, she greets him at the door by beating him in the neck. She would argue this is to impress upon him the risks of an interracial relationship in Mississippi but also because she'd prefer him to be dating a black girl. It's one of many harrowing moments in which - however you might feel about parents disciplining their kids - it's clear that her actions have veered into physical abuse. I don't know what to make of an America in which we feel compelled to hurt the people we love in order to keep them alive. That Laymon does keep living and even thriving doesn't mean he and his mother are ever fully free of all they endured along the way. Addictions, toxic tendencies and ailing health emerge like demons summoned by past sins and grievances. And if you find yourself wincing at the detail of this raw family portrait, I'd argue that it's because it's not a portrait at all but a mirror. What have we done to ourselves - what have we done to one another - in order to survive? And will it ever be enough? Any truthful answer will be devastating, but as Laymon's excellent memoir suggests, a refusal to ask and answer difficult questions about ourselves and the people we love can be lethal. Part of the wonder of Laymon's book is his commitment to getting as close to the truth as possible. SAEED JONES is a poet and a co-host of BuzzFeed News's "AM to DM" show. His latest book, "Prelude to Bruise," was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.