She also cares for Laymon, finds him beautiful, and imagines the two of them as pragmatic, canny politicians: as she puts it, the black Hillary and Bill Clinton. Fourteen years after Wright’s death, another prodigious Black male writer from Mississippi was born: Kiese Laymon. She has another boyfriend, a clean-cut doctor-in-training, and she goads Laymon about his past relationship with Abby, which is still the subject of gossip. Cake never fought back” (123).ĭuring the early part of his freshman year, Laymon gets involved with a sharp, funny woman named Nzola. He was also low on cash again and spent a lot of his limited money on massive binges: “Cakes felt safe, private, and celebratory.
When he and his friends wrote well, their professors accused them of plagiarism. There was no room for him to be curious and experimental, or to make mistakes-in short, no room for him to really be a scholar. The idea of excellence is a wire, sometimes barbed, often electrified, strung through nearly every page of Kiese Laymon’s memoir. Laymon remembers holding himself back, speaking up in class only when he could present himself as an exemplary black student. Laymon’s memoir Heavy won the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times, and secured the top spot as a. HEAVY An American Memoir By Kiese Laymon 241 pp. Laymon and a small group of black friends form a close-knit group to help each other endure the school’s overwhelming whiteness.
0 kommentar(er)
