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Heavy is Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir. It won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. Oct 17, 2018 “At our house,” writes Kiese Laymon — recalling a Mississippi childhood in a startling, essential new memoir, “Heavy” — “there was no pantry. There was hardly any food other than spoiled pimento. Interview: Listen in as Kiese Laymon, whose emotionally compelling and nuanced narrative, Heavy, became the first memoir to win our Audiobook of the Year, talks about what it meant to voice his own story — both to him and the mother to whom he wrote it. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The better the writer, the more unassailable the identity. This makes the identity crisis of Inheritance all the more precarious—and Shapiro’s presentation of it all the more remarkableIn various, subtly shifting forms and incurably readable prose, she has narrated the prime metaphysical subjects of adulthood, including marriage, spirituality, the deaths of parents, being a parent.
Kiese Laymon Books
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