Heavy: An American Memoir (Paperback)

So beautifully written, so insightful, so thoughtful, so honest, so vulnerable, so intimate ... A gift - Jesmyn Ward, TLS Books of the Year

Oh my god. Heavy is astonishing. Difficult. Intense. Layered. Wow. Just wow - Roxane Gay, author of 'Hunger'

Brilliant and ground-shaking - Elizabeth Gilbert

Unflinchingly honest - Reni Eddo-Lodge

Laymon's writing, as rich and elegant as mahogany, offers us comfort even as we grapple with his book's unflinching honesty ... 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 ... Excellent - New York Times

Quite simply, Heavy is one of the most important and intense books of the year because of the unyielding, profoundly original and utterly heartbreaking way it addresses and undermines expectations for what exactly it's like to possess and make use of a male black body in America - Los Angeles Times

It’s a book aching with heart yet proffering no illusions. It’s raw and vulnerable and suffused with fiercest seeing. It’s masculinity it all its self-consuming threat and secret beauty. Kiese Laymon writes of his mother “You modeled a rugged love…. You demanded that we develop a radical moral intelligence.” In Heavy, this singular triumph of writing, he’s done the same - David Chariandy, author of 'Brother'

Tremendous. A searing excavation of trauma and memory that left me stunned. Heavy is a gift and Laymon one of the most important voices around. I cannot stop thinking about it - Irenosen Okojie

Heavy is an act of truth telling unlike any other I can think of in American literature, partly due to Laymon’s uniquely gifted mind—his ability to pursue the ways we lie to each other while also loving each other, or, not, and the humility he brings to bear while doing so, this consistently brings us back to life, to what matters in this world. Heavy is a gift to us, if we can pick it up—a moral exercise and an intimate history that is at the same time a story about America - Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Gorgeous ... This reckoning with trauma, terror, fear, sexual violence, abuse, addiction, family, secrets, lies, truth, and the weight of the nation and his body would be affecting in less capable hands, but with Kiese at the helm it is nothing short of a modern classic. These sentences that he so painstakingly crafted are some the most arresting ever printed in the English language - Mychal Denzel Smith, New York Times bestselling author of 'Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching'

In Heavy, Kiese Laymon asks how to survive in a body despite the many violences that are inflicted upon it: the violence of racism, of misogyny, of history — the violence of a culture that treats the bodies of black men with fear and suspicion more often than with tenderness and attentive care. In prose that sears at the same time as it soars, Kiese Laymon breaks the unbearable silence each of these violences, in their peculiar cruelty, has imposed. Permeated with humility, bravery, and a bold intersectional feminism, Heavy is a triumph. I stand in solidarity with this book, and with its writer - Lacy Johnson, author of The Other Side and The Reckonings

Heavy heaves, sings, hums, and runs all night to make it clear that there's an alternative, that Black history's first premise is mutuality. That mutuality isn't perfect, ain't safe, it's dangerous, in fact, and Heavy moves in a terrible and beautiful and so gentle proximity to that--at crucial times our primary--danger, the ones we love and who love us the most. I was with Kiese the whole damn heavy-floating way, word for word in laughter and tears, in recognition, refraction and revelation. But, way more than any of those, sentence by sentence, I was with Kiese in thanks - Ed Pavlic, author of Another Kind of Madness

How appropriate Kiese Laymon’s stunning memoir is titled, Heavy. Not only are the stains and hurt highlighted here, heavy, but also the writer’s capacity to revive graveyards of ghosts who haunt and seemingly will continue to haunt the protagonist. Laymon is a fearless writer, our writer, who’s willing to expose and explore his most vulnerable interiors so that we might get closer to our truths. This is a southern book for backroads and cornbread, for Cadillacs and collard greens, for big mamas and moonshine. Heavy is full of our beautiful and ugly histories, and a declaration of how we might seek redemption. The colorful and complicated characters here speak a blues and poetry that is both nostalgic and familiar. This is the book we need right now. We should all be thankful for this ultramodern weighty testament of heartache, catharsis, and utter brilliance - Derrick Harriell, author of Stripper in Wonderland and Ropes

You do not just read Kiese Laymon's work. It does a reading of you too—one that unburies the stories you thought you would never be able to tell truthfully, and reminds you of your voice to tell them. Heavy marks this quality in its highest definition yet. Written with as much devastating poignance as a humor only the Black South could inspire, Heavy asks readers not just to observe Laymon's courageous journey to understand even the most frightening complexities of life in an anti-Black, sexist, fatphobic society, but to embark on it with him. In doing so, Laymon's gorgeous wordsmithing moves us beyond simple binaries of pleasure and pain, joy and trauma, toward a deeper love for communities too often flattened into one dimension. Heavy is a book for the ages - Hari Zyad, author of Black Boy Out of Time

Kiese Laymon is our most important urgent fiercest voice. To read Kiese Laymon is to be in awe - Junot Diaz, author of 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'

A challenging, perceptive, powerhouse of a read - Monocle