He and his mother find themselves in the same casinos, pretending not to see each other. Then he, too, develops a gambling addiction. At last, he pushes his body past its limits, severely injures his leg, and regains all the weight he lost. Meanwhile, his mother borrows more and more money from him, and he discovers that she’s developed a gambling addiction. In his new memoir, Heavy, he offers the answers he’s found, although by the end of the book it. He becomes an English professor at Vassar (again encountering persistent racism even from his supposedly progressive colleagues), and his eating disorder gets out of control. Kiese Laymon, a writer and professor of English, has spent much of his life asking these questions. All the while, he’s tormented by self-hatred and the necessity of choking back the truth to survive. He’s expelled from his first college on racist grounds and forced to transfer, and like his mother he becomes a successful academic. Rather than binging, he begins to starve and overexercise, and he gets thinner and thinner. In college, racist students target him and his girlfriend after he starts writing for the school newspaper, and he develops a new eating disorder. Laymon’s survival, he finds, depends on his ability to present a “respectable” face, and his fatness makes his blackness even less acceptable to the white world he has to deal with.
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