And then I want to write honestly about Black Lives, Black thighs, Black loves, Black laughs, Black foods, Black addictions, Black stretch marks, Black dollars, Black words, Black abuses, Black blues, Black belly buttons, Black wins, Black bins, Black beans, Black consent, Black parents or Black children. Kiese is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, and he grew up in Jackson, Mississippi.ĭan Pashman: Please note: This episode includes explicit language, as well as discussion of various types of abuse. The book won the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and Audible’s Audiobook of the Year. In Heavy, Kiese processes his upbringing and adulthood to examine what it says about himself, his home state of Mississippi, and American life as a whole. She believed that the best protection against day-to-day racism - the best way to survive really - was excellence. When he was a kid she made him write a story or report every night on a range of topics.

Kiese’s entire memoir is written to his mother. 'Food to me is a paradoxical way to get into all of the mess of what we are.' 'As artists, we got to be able to talk about all of it at once because it always happens at once,' he says. In doing so, disordered eating, anti-Blackness, fatphobia, and addiction all bubble together. In his book, Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese weaves together all these experiences. Over the course of his life he’s gone from being heavy, to dropping down to two percent body fat, to becoming heavy again. Often, he’s tried to deal with that pain by eating, or not eating. And he continues to be shaped by the experience of being Black in America. Kiese Laymon’s memoir is far from the weight loss journey he originally envisioned.

Kiese heavy