Don't fight when you're angry. Think when you're angry.

I really wish I remembered where I saw this book being recommended, but I don't. Heavy by Kiese Laymon was on my hold list at the library for a bit, and when the audiobook came available, I dove in. I didn't know what to expect and I know I'm not the intended audience, but I loved this book. Loved it in a painful way.

It was heavy. Heavy enough I had to take pauses to regroup. 

If you listen to Laymon in the interview (below), you'll find out this book wasn't meant to be what it turned out to be. Instead of a weight loss book with insights on how people deal with food, it turned into a memoir of Laymon's life and how his body bore the brunt of the abuses. 

Laymon's father left early on, leaving his mom to raise him alone. You can tell that Laymon knows she tried her best but it was lacking. He was used to being beaten and, later on, being used by his mom. In his younger life, he ate. And ate. And ate. Until he was over 200lbs at age 11. He was big and black and, in America, that isn't a good thing for him. His family knew that simply by being him, he was a target. 

As he grew up and started branching out from Jackson, Mississippi to go to college, his eating disorder went in the complete opposite direction. Everything he had to deal with, everything on his shoulders, everything in his past, was written on his body. 

Even becoming a professor at Vassar didn't stop the trauma. If anything, it seemed to add more. 

Throughout his life, he wrote. He wrote about racial injustice for a college newspaper and was threatened to be kicked out of the school. He constantly wrote (google his name, you'll find a treasure trove of writing) and tried to fight back through words. One of the reasons for my pauses while listening to Laymon read his book? Just absorbing his prose. He's magnificent with the written word. 

I also paused because it was hard being in his shoes. I didn't have to live his life, I can only step in to briefly with him and that was difficult. But that's why I read. I can't live all the possible lives out there, so I join in to the ones who let me in through books. And I come out with more insight and perspective than what I had before.

“My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.”

Interview with the author