Summary Of Kiese Laymon's Heavy

American memoir Heavy by Kiese Laymon is a work of art that should be read by anyone interested in the emotional journal of author Laymon’s work and the story of his persistent struggles while trying to find himself and becoming a man in a racist, weight, and body image obsessed world. Heavy dives into the duality between familial violence and love and its overlap. This is a story of friends and girlfriends, teachers and books, Black abundance, family, abuse, and violence, narratives about food and eating in its attraction and safety, as well as its revulsion and gluttony. Laymon is one character and his body is another in this memoir. His Black body is constantly objectified and threatened, leading him to lie and manipulate, using these harmful

When Laymon gets to college, despite originally feeling good about himself, and his self-confidence boosting, upon meeting his new girlfriend Nzola, they discover that they both feel suffocated by the grips of racism on their college campus. Upon becoming a popular writer around his college campus, Laymon attracted the attention of his college editorial. Laymon wants to write about revolution and the “wickedness of the white man” on an all-white campus, putting both himself and Nzola in danger as the school students and teachers riot over the new Black addition to the paper. Laymon wants to write things he thinks will impress his white audience and make them listen to Black stories and voices talk about the oppressive system in which we suffer. Contrary to Laymon’s hopes, they were not impressed. On page 142, he writes, “The editor told me I needed to make the ending of the piece much more color-blind. He said I would lose readers if I kept the focus of the essay on what black students at Millsaps could do to organize, love each other, and navigate institutional

129) Laymon lies to Nzola because he feels bad about himself and wants to forget about the trauma he battles with and the effects he’s hiding, making her distrust him and destabilizing their relationship. During a conversation between the two, she says to him, “If you want me to believe you when you’re lying then you want to see me break.” (pg. 129) Finally, the person Laymon lies to the most in his life - his mother, for her abusive parenting growing up and their unparalleled views on how she was supposed to protect him from the harshness and brutality of white people in society. Their relationship was weighted by love simultaneously as it was tainted with pain and suffering, and intergenerational wounds trickled down from his mother’s problems she faced throughout her life with him. Due to his mother's violent discipline style, the older he gets, the more he starts to resent her and lies to her as a sort of “revenge”. He describes a moment between him and his mother as a teenager, “You asked me what was wrong. I told you I was upset that you and my father didn’t try harder to make it