Heavy

Laymon grew up in Mississippi with a mother who loved him fiercely and dangerously — who beat him, pushed him academically, and passed her own trauma into his body. This memoir is addressed to her. It is about food and fatness and Black bodies and the weight of what Black families carry across generations in America. The most honest American memoir of the last decade. Not confessional — something more demanding than confession. A reckoning. A dispatch from inside the specific violence of loving someone whose love is also the thing that hurts you.