• “Heavy is an apt title for this memoir, which covers not only physical obesity—the author weighed 300 pounds as a teenager—but also the weight of systemic racism and white supremacy, and the power of a mother’s love.” –Emily Temple, Literary Hub.
• Oct 16, 2018 Heavy is a “gorgeous, guttinggenerous” (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.

• Heavy A Memoir Of Wyoming
• What Is A Memoir Book
• Heavy A Memoir

Summary

NOTE - The language of the summary here, and for the rest of this analysis, is written in present tense to reflect the immediacy and energy of the author’s writing style and narrative focus.

Heavy A Memoir Of Wyoming

'Meager.'

What Is A Memoir Book

Laymon’s heart wrenching confessions pile up at the end of his memoir, striking vulnerability while still maintaining agency. His story, written in second person to his mother, is multi-layered and gives a wide and crisp picture of the life of a black boy in Mississippi, of a heavy black boy in Missisiippi, of a heavy black boy in Mississippi. “ Heavy is an apt title for this memoir, which covers not only physical obesity—the author weighed 300 pounds as a teenager—but also the weight of systemic racism and white supremacy, and the power of a mother’s love.” –Emily Temple, Literary Hub.

The author and his friend LaThon start Grade Eight at a new, mostly white school; their previous, mostly black school had been closed due to lack of funding. In class, they banter back and forth as they had always done, playing games with the meanings and implications of their two favorite words – “abundance” and “meager.” Their behavior gets them in trouble with their white teacher, gets them “whuppings” when they get home, and gets them separated into different classes. All this leads the author to recall how his mother had told him that as a black boy, he had to be twice as...

Heavy A Memoir

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the author of the genre-bending novel, Long Division and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An AmericanMemoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on several new projects, including the long poem, Good God, the horror comedy, And So On, the children’s book, City Summer, Country Summer and the film Heavy: An American Memoir. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents, more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing.