I have definitely felt, but there’s this thing in our culture where the bar is so low for us as Black men that if we just admit something, hordes of women will be there to encourage us. We don’t even have to deal with it. Young men are taught that we don’t have eating disorders, but I think most of us do.Īs a Black man writing about a disorder that has been depicted as only a White women’s disease, do you ever feel self-conscious? Have people tried to question your masculinity because of it? Part of not knowing was because I was a boy. When I really started to think about it, I was just like, Oh! I started doing all this research and realizing that there was something really wrong with me. One of my students talked to me about binging and purging. I mean, in retrospect I was trying to disappear, but I didn’t know it was an eating disorder.Īs a teacher now, in the 2000s, you actually have to talk to your students about a lot. That might be part of why I felt so good. I started getting a lot more attention from people. It wasn’t good for me, but I was losing weight. I got to the point where I was eating two packs of ramen once every three days. And I knew when I ate a lot of what people consider bad food it made me feel good but it also made me feel terrible. When I started starving and running myself into exhaustion, I also felt euphoric. I had never heard the word “binge,” and I definitely had never heard the word “purge.” I’d heard of anorexia, but at the time I thought it was something that only White girls had. Did you know at any point that you had eating disorders? You write about loving the feeling of binging on junk food early in your life and later loving the feeling of starving yourself. Let’s talk about your relationship to food and weight in the book. That book wouldn’t have been longer than 15 pages. I’m working on a project now where I’m trying to write about my relationship with my father, but he just wasn’t there. You don’t really discuss your father or other father figures in the book. I wanted to do the hardest thing I could, which is to write it directly to her. She very young, and there’s just a lot of things that we never talked about. Next, I planned to write one chapter to my grandmama, one to my mama, one to my imaginary daughter and one to an ex-girlfriend. Then I realized the hardest chapter to write was to my mama because it was just me and her. Let me try to write a book back to them where I don’t lie. But along the way, while talking to them, I decided to write to them a lot of stories they were telling me just weren’t true. At first I was going to 100 or 150 pounds while talking to my mama, grandmama and aunts about their relationships to food and weight and sexual violence. You know, it was an entirely different book at first. Why did you decide to write a book to a “you” that is your mother? I was surprised at how supportive and loving they were. My auntie has also read it, and I read it to my grandmama. If she didn’t want something in there, I wanted to give her a chance to talk to me about it. I had to show it to my mama along the way. It is a consideration of what life could look like if we all told the whole truth. Colorlines talked to Laymon, a professor of English and creative writing at The University of Mississippi, a few days before the official release of “Heavy.” The result is this candid Q+A edited for length and clarity. There is Laymon’s gambling addiction and his deeply destructive relationship to food.Īnd yet “Heavy” is not an indictment of Laymon’s family, his community or himself. He tells of a babysitter who molested him and of a group of his male friends who gang-raped one of his female friends. There is the poverty that persists in his household despite his mother’s degrees and help from his grandmother. He recalls his mom beating him “for not being perfect” and her boyfriend beating her. Written to his mother, a single Jackson State University professor who had him when she was a college sophomore, “Heavy” details many of the traumas Laymon sustained growing up. But it is also a very specific story about a heavyset Black boy from Jackson, Mississippi, who was taught but never believed that being exceptional would protect him from the ever-present racism and violence of his surroundings. As he did in his previous two books, Kiese Laymon calls out White supremacy in his latest, “Heavy: An American Memoir.” The book, which was released today (October 16), is certainly political.
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