I wanted to tell you a lie.

I read Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division and his nonfiction essays How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others a few years back and I could tell by the early previews and even the cover of this book that it was likely to be very good. And it is. There’s a handful of comparisons on the cover of this book from early reviewers to Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which is also subtitled “American Hunger” and while I do agree there’s some real connections between the two, one of the major shifts from that book to this is how much of Richard Wright’s anger is expressed outwardly–the book starts with him burning his family home down as a child, Kiese Laymon’s pain and anger is directed inward.

The book begins with Laymon in his early adolescence at a kind of “babysitter’s” house keenly aware of the disturbing sexual violence happening at the house with a kind of banality. Like a lot of kids, he’s pretending to understand some sexual slang phrase to be like the older kids–I distinctly remember pretending to know what “69” meant when my older brother and his friends made jokes about it–but this phrase here is “running a train.” Sure, this could very be a consensual act, but it’s almost certainly not.

When Kiese tells his mom he doesn’t want to go back, she smacks him across the face, as she does throughout this book. Not wanting to upset her anymore he internalizes his fear and pain. Throughout the early parts of the book there’s this same pattern, not wanting to upset his mother, getting hit or beaten when he inevitably does, and turning into self-abuse and anger, usually through over-eating.

As the book continues and he gets older (and we are gratefully moved away from his childhood where the pain is so terrible), we start to understand more about his mother and his relationship. She does seem like a remarkable woman–a young PhD working on a post-doc, becoming a professor, and making significant moves in her career. But she’s also a violent and abusive mother (physical, but also emotional) who well into her adulthood is borrowing and begging huge amounts of cash from her son, who most certainly makes a lot less money than she does. And throughout the book Laymon is constantly seeking her attention and her approval, failing, and turning his pain inward. In the later sections he develops a eating disorder, controlling his body to continuously lose weight–eating 800 calories a day, running in the morning and the evening, and seeking some kind of ephemeral lower and lower weight.

As the book comes to a close he’s recently experiences a horrible set of months at his university where not only is he denied tenure, but he’s accused on plagiarism.

It’s important to back up and discuss that while his mother is all these things, she’s also the most sane and most keen protector of him, prepping him to be dealing with the unrelenting and oppressive racism of the United States, continuously imparting proof that they won’t let up on him.

This book is painful and beautifully written.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Heavy-American-Memoir-Kiese-Laymon/dp/1501125656/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1548251291&sr=8-1&keywords=kiese+laymon)