Still, just as language can cordon off meaning, it can also open up new possibilities. Reading the words in his notebook, Laymon knew something was there, waiting for him to uncover it: “I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit and sift until I found a way to free the memory.” And eventually free himself too, though the liberation on offer doesn’t feel light and unburdened; it feels heavy like the title, and heavy like the truth.

Image Kiese Laymon

Laymon’s mother loves him, and he loves her. She also beat him regularly “for not being perfect,” wielding belts, shoes, fists and clothes hangers. When he briefly attended a majority-white school in eighth grade, the whippings took on an added layer of humiliation — not so much his, but hers. “I knew you didn’t want white folk to judge you if I came to school with visible welts,” he says, so she would make a ruin of his back and his thighs, where nobody could see. To save him from the judgment of white people, she beat him; to save herself from the judgment of white people, she hid the beating. Even as a child, Laymon knew that none of his white classmates was getting punished because of what black people thought.

At that point, Laymon was an eighth-grader who weighed 231 pounds, eating his way through jars of peanut butter and guzzling blue cheese dressing from the bottle. He would think about “the sweat and fat between my thighs, and the new stretch marks streaking toward my nipples.” He despised his body and wanted to be desired. “Like most fat black boys,” he writes, “when flirted with, I fell in love.” His mother’s student would babysit him and touch him in ways that made him think she might be his first girlfriend. What he describes couldn’t be called anything other than sexual abuse, even if the confused boy who craved a girlfriend never called it that.

Laymon revisits and revises his memories, inhabiting how he felt at the time, a child in the 1980s, and comparing it to how he feels now, in middle age. “Heavy” traces his life over the years, through high school and college and graduate school. He gains weight and he loses it — starving his body down to 159 pounds — before gaining it back all over again. Food, whether too much or too little, was a way to punish himself. Money served the same function too, as he goes from watching his mother’s addiction to the slots to acquiring a gambling problem of his own.

All the while he is observing and absorbing what is happening around him: Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, Rodney King, the police shootings of Tamir Rice and Philando Castile. Taking the commuter train into New York City after 9/11, he stands up on behalf of a South Asian family getting some guff from a couple of guys in the car. “For the first time in my life,” Laymon recalls, “I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space.” But his altruism, he concedes, is muddied by his own self-regard. On the train back home, he writes, “I remember feeling sad there were no ‘Muslim-looking’ folk in my car whom I could feel good about defending.”