Heavy - An American Memoir

Kiese Laymon

Scribner

2018

256 páginas

8h 32m

ISBN-10: 1501125656

Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

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 his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and 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.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

I am vunerable but i am not powerless

It made me see shrimp colors. It shaped things that i’d had in the back of my mind into words, and those words, into memory and hope. Heavy is a nuanced testment of love, loss, anger, grieve, addiction, body image, the importance of education an so much more.

Nothing about this memoir is straightfoward or simple. Kiese Laymon’s portrayal of white hegemony, power struggles, violence and generational legacy is analytical, sensite and sincere, a testimony and a manifesto demanding us to face the social order around us and our place in it.