Heavy

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Weight

Weight is the central image of Heavy, and it works in rich, complex ways. Laymon experiences his own weight as an expression of concealment and repression: thinness and fatness are to do with different kinds of hiding. Heaviness is also an image of complete personhood, the ability to hold conflicting and painful truths in one solid self.

When Laymon begins to become anorexic, his Uncle Jimmy looks askance at him: “My nephew went to grad school and now he turning into a white girl. You just love losing weight? That’s damn near the craziest shit I heard in thirty years, Kie” (166). Jimmy—and the world—imagine weight loss as both a white and a female matter; Laymon, in his drive to make himself small, uses a female-coded kind of self-hatred to manufacture a body more palatable to both the Black and the white world. Weight-loss is the disguise of acceptability, diminishing the self in an effort not to be offensive, not to take up space.

Laymon’s fatness, on the other hand, links to a different kind of hiding: a desire to shove down a pain that his family and his country alike won’t allow him to express. Laymon binges when he’s been hurt, and he often binges on foods that are themselves symbolically weighty, representing affection, silence, abasement, or denial (see the “Symbols” section for more on this). Fatness is the disguise of unacceptability, an expression of unreleasable—and heavy—secrets.

When, as a 12-year-old, Laymon asks his grandmother if he weighs too much, she tells him that his weight is just right: he’s “Heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy enough for” (60). In this loving embrace of his body as it is, Laymon finds a redeeming heaviness. To be “heavy” in this sense is to be a whole self: a person able both to contain and to speak one’s pain, and not to try to escape it through denial, repression, or violence. It’s a kind of selfhood illuminated by the book’s epigram, taken from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters: “[...] wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well” (xii). This is heaviness as “that black abundance,” as well as the ability to hold and speak pain (66).

Racism and Language

Laymon’s exploration of American racism (and the related forms of discrimination that weave in and out of American culture) often looks at what is seen and not seen, spoken and unspoken. His eating disorders, in which both starvation and binging are ways to falsify and repress truthful identity, takes root in a dominant white culture that instantaneously labels Black people’s bodies as unacceptable and their experiences as unspeakable. Language, Laymon shows, is a major site of day-to-day white violence against Black people—a way of “shooting us out of the sky,” as his mother often describes it, that the people who are doing the shooting are allowed not to see or understand.

In one casually racist incident, a white teacher at Laymon’s high school asks a group of Black students to tell one of their friends that his body odor is “gross,” and that all of them have a responsibility to tell him to shower: after all, they’ll be judged as a group. Laymon registers the teacher’s racism through the lens of language: “There wasn’t a ‘gross’ or anything approximating a ‘gross’ in our vocabulary, or our stories. Bodies at Holy Family were heavier than the bodies at St. Richard. And none of those heavy bodies were gross” (75). When his friend LaThon later uses the white-coded “gross” to reassure Laymon that his fatness isn’t gross, he’s rejecting not just the white teachers’ racist generalizations, but the language they use to enforce their racism. Language, Laymon shows, creates worlds and possibilities—or denies them.

Similarly, when one of Laymon’s white students at Vassar escapes any consequences for dealing drugs by claiming, ludicrously, that “a big dark man” forced him to buy cocaine, Laymon is appalled at his colleagues’ readiness to accept this story—and their refusal to hear the racist dog-whistle in the word “dark.”

Linguistic racism is also at work in Laymon’s mother’s insistence that he learn to speak without contractions and Black-coded slang. This, like thinness, is a means of disguise, a way of trying to evade more overt white violence by playing along with the insidious white violence of oppressive language.

Truth and Lies

Laymon begins “Been,” his prologue, by refusing to write the redemptive and reassuring “American memoir” that “you” want (1). We learn that this “you” is his mother—but not for a few pages. Right at the start, Laymon is addressing his whole audience, and he’s absolutely refusing to do what they want him to. When he returns to the language and ideas of this first chapter in his epilogue, “Bend,” he makes himself clear: it is not just his family that taught him to lie, but the inherent untruth of American culture. Maybe we won’t heal from our lies, he suggests: “We will hide like Americans hide [...] We will lie like Americans lie” (241).

Lying like Americans lie: this is a complicated and engulfing sort of lying. Laymon’s insistence on finding the truth—a process, as he says, that takes patient revision—is born of the poisonous effects of lies on a scale from the personal to the worldwide. The secrets that Laymon must conceal as a child—that he’s been abused, that he’s watched the neighbor boys abuse girls and children, that his mother’s boyfriend is violent, that his family can’t always pay for groceries—are linked to the big American lie that all Americans are on an equal footing. The abuse Laymon suffers is the dominance of adults over children; the abuse he witnesses is the dominance of men over women and children; his outwardly successful mother’s poverty is the dominance of white people over Black people. Adding insult to injury, Laymon and his mother must also maintain the soothing lie that their white colleagues aren’t racist or suffer the consequences.

Being forced to keep secrets, contain truths too painful to bear, is a violence to the person who must maintain the lie. And, as Laymon observes, it’s also a means of generating more violence. Reflecting on his dishonesty in his relationships with women, he writes: “What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent or entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square? I’d become good at losing weight and great at convincing women they didn’t see or know what they absolutely saw and knew. [...] I’d never been honest with myself about what carrying decades of lies did to other people’s hearts and heads” (208).

The healed, whole, complete self is the self that can both accept and express truth, even painful truth. Heavy at its outset announces itself as a book that will make this difficult and necessary effort. Its final acknowledgment that the effort may well fail is, in a complicated paradox, a part of the work of truthfulness.