Prize winners who have a lot on their minds.
Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy: An American Memoir” quickly became one of the breakthrough books of 2018 when it was released last October. In the memoir, Laymon writes with stunning honesty about his experiences as a survivor of physical and sexual abuse, his struggles with obesity and anorexia, and his relationship with his mother, to whom the book is written in the second person.
“Heavy” received considerable critical acclaim and won the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Writing for The Times, writer Nathan Deuel called Laymon’s book “one of the most important and intense books of the year because of the unyielding, profoundly original and utterly heartbreaking way it addresses and undermines expectations for what exactly it’s like to possess and make use of a male black body in America.”
Laymon, who lives in Mississippi, was named the winner of the third annual Los Angeles Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose for “Heavy.” He spoke to The Times via phone from Boston, where he was on tour for the paperback edition of “Heavy.” This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
What does it mean to you to be named the newest winner of the Isherwood Prize?
I really like that prize, not because I won it, but I’ve judged it before, and I think it’s the only prize of its kind that looks at autobiographical prose. I was shocked that I won it, but I’m really thankful I won it. I’m somebody who really takes memoir and autobiographical prose really seriously; there’s an art to it that I think we don’t consider often, because I think we think if it’s real, you just put what’s real down on the page. So it meant a lot to me that the judges could see the artistry of what I was trying to do and also just the soulfulness of what I tried to do.
What initially inspired you to write “Heavy,” to tell the story of your childhood?
I’d been trying to write that book since I was 12. I didn’t know I was trying to write it at 12, but when I wrote my first novel and this collection of essays, I was really trying to write “Heavy.” I needed to write that book because there were just so many secrets my mother and I kept from each other. And I just wanted to think a lot about the way secrets impact our bodies. Not just in the way they make us eat too much, or not just in the way they make us eat too little, but often in the way they make us hide our bodies from each other. I wish that could have been the first book I’d ever written, I think that would have opened up a lot for me. But I’m glad that I could get it out.
It’s such a brutally honest book, and you write about some extremely traumatic events in your life. Was writing it emotionally difficult for you, or was it more cathartic, or was it a little bit of both?
The actual writing of it was not cathartic. The writing of it was really hard. When I finished it finally, I was just so glad that it was over with. But the process, having it received so generously, I guess has been sort of cathartic, and it means a lot. But it also means that a lot of the stuff I was writing through is shared by a lot of other people in the world. So while I’m happy to write something where people can see themselves, it’s also sometimes sad to think about, the layers of desperation and fear and terror that a lot of us go through. But the book is also about joy, you know? It’s about the joy of language. I’m happy that people could feel some of what I was trying to do. But the actual creating of the book was as close to hell as I think I’m going to get.
I’m guessing you heard from a lot of readers who appreciated the book, and maybe readers who’ve gone through some of the same things you did as a younger man. Are there any reactions you’ve received that you found particularly meaningful or gratifying to you?
Yeah, well, I’m just one of those writers where if anybody spends any time reading anything I write, I just feel grateful, because I know there’s so many other things people could be doing. But particularly when I get letters from mothers and fathers, and their children, and when parents and their children come to me at readings and say, “You know, we read this book together,” that always gets me choked up. Because it’s a book that I wrote to my mom with the hope that parents and parental figures would read it with their children. So to see it actually happen, that kind of thing makes me really happy, and it’s something that I didn’t expect. I hoped for it, but I didn’t expect it.
Kiese Laymon at the L.A. Times Festival of Books: Laymon appears at noon April 14 on the panel “Voices of the Black American Experience,” moderated by NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates and featuring Casey Gerald and Bridgett Davis.