“There can be no liberation when our most intimate relationships are built on—and really inflected by—deception, abuse, misdirection, antiblackness, patriarchy, and bald-faced lies.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 239)
Quotes from Heavy
“We all broken. Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we’re gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it’s possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 228)
“My body knew that my weight, the exact number, became an emotional, psychological, and spiritual destination a long time ago. I knew, and worried, about how much I weight and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old. The weight reminded me of how much I’d eaten, how much I’d starved, how much I’d exercised, and how much I sat still yesterday. My body knew I was no more liberated or free when I was 159 pounds with 2 percent body fat that I was at 319 pounds with achy joints. I loved the rush of pushing my body beyond places it never wanted to go, but I was addicted to controlling the number on that scale. Controlling that number on the scale, more than writing a story or essay or feeling loved or making money or having sex, made me feel less gross, and most abundant. Losing weight helped me forget.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 207)
“My job as a teacher was to help them breathe with excellence and discipline in the classroom. The ones that love you, they become what you model. Don’t forget that. Help them breathe by modeling responsible love in the classroom every single day. The most important thing a teacher can do is give their students permission to be loving and excellent.”
Kiese Laymon’s mom, Heavy (Page 180)
“In class, I only spoke when I could be an articulate defender of black people. I didn’t use the classroom to ask questions. I didn’t use the classroom to make ungrounded claims. There was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than. For the first time in my life, the classroom scared me. And when I was scared, I ran to cakes, because cakes felt safe, private, and celebratory. Cakes never fought back.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 123)
“I asked you if I could take some books from the house to have in my dorm room. You reached up, pulled on my neck, and kissed me on the top of the head. I pulled away. ‘Maybe the books will protect you,’ you said. ‘Take all the books you need. And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry. Don’t let those people shoot you out of the sky while I’m gone.’ I rolled my eyes and sucked hard on my teeth as you walked to the end of the line. ‘Don’t be good,’ you said across the space between us. ‘Be perfect. Be fantastic.'”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 119)
“The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: ‘economic inequality,’ ‘housing discrimination,’ ‘sexual violence,’ ‘mass incarceration,’ ‘homophobia,’ ’empire,’ ‘mass eviction,’ ‘post traumatic stress disorder,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘neo-confederacy,’ ‘mental health,’ or ‘parental abuse,’ yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 114)
“You hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you. God gives us five sense for a reason. You hear me? Use them. Stop hunting for distractions. Stop taking your own legs out. It’s enough mess out there trying to beat us down without you helping.”
Kiese Laymon’s Grandmother, Heavy (Page 114)
“The truth was that practicing writing meant practicing sitting down, sitting still, and my body did not ever want to be still. When it had to be still, all it wanted to do was imagine dunking with two hands or kissing a girl who loved me. Sitting still, just as much as any other part of writing, took practice. Most days, my body did not want to practice, but I convinced it that sitting still and writing were a path to memory.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 86)
“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 86)
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 26)“‘I think I want to lose weight. Can you help me? I be sweating too much when I try to talk to people I don’t want to be sweaty around.’
‘You mean girls, Kie?’
‘I guess I mean girls.’
‘If someone doesn’t like you for you,’ you said, ‘they are not worth sweating around. Save your sweat for someone who values it.'”
“Some days, the tears just be pouring out my eyes, Kie. But Grandmama is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as a somebody worth respecting. You hear me? Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either. But I am okay. You hear me?”
Kiese Laymon’s Grandmother, Heavy (Page 8)
“You slept on a slender pallet that night in Vegas. I was supposed to be sleeping next to you but I couldn’t because I was so happy. Your snores reminded me that you were alive. If you were alive and next to me, I had everything in the world I could ever want.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 3)
Heavy: An American Memoir [Book]
Book Overview: 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. 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. 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. 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.