The basics: Kiese Laymon, an English professor, has written a memoir that - at the risk of sounding hyperbolic - will tear your heart out and leave it bleeding next to you, grateful for the opportunity to consider why and how it happened. This book is not only beautiful; it’s important.
Laymon’s writing is electric. His style - a mix of the spectacular, “upper class” English his mother instilled in him and the musical, mellifluous colloquialisms from childhood in the South - shook me. I had to read this book slowly, page by page, to digest and savor every bite and to let his choices (repetition, use of the second person to address his mother throughout the book) do their work. This is a personal story about Laymon’s struggle with abuse, weight, identity, connection, language, racism, and more - and a treatise on how white culture in the US stifles and penetrates and eviscerates the safety of people of color.
It’s spectacular. I don’t know how else to say it.
Read if you’re into: If you’re an American, you should read this. If you’re a white American, you need to read this.
Avoid if: You are devoid of empathy and hate spectacular writing.
Favorite excerpt: “Nothing I’d read in school prepared me to think through the permanence of violence in Mississippi, Maryland, and the whole nation. After school, I kept reading and rearranging the words I’d written, trying to understand what the words meant for my understanding of violence. 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.”
If you liked this, try: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates; anything by Roxane Gay, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin