Kiese Laymon
On Speaking Well of Oneself, Honoring Our Ancestors and Those Yet To Be Born, and Conjuring Love.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Hello Beyonders!
I’ve been doing interviews for over three decades now and have probably spoken with close to 1,000 people. Back in the day, it was musicians: Sinéad O’Connor, Tony Bennett, Radiohead, Tricky, The Verve, Mary J. Blige, Ice Cube, Metallica, Lenny Kravitz, and so many more. More recently, authors, many of whom can be found here on Beyond. And not once did an interview fall through (even in the drug-fueled early nineties when bands were notorious for not being, shall we say, all that responsible). Until now.
The interview scheduled for this week fell through not once but twice. The first time, I thought it was the fault of the PR person so when a new PR person came on board I gave it another go. It would appear it was not the fault of the PR person. It was someone I really wanted to speak with: they’re brilliant and into all sorts of things that I admire. I put in about fifteen hours of prep time and had a compelling list of questions. But, alas, it was not meant to be.
On the upside: It gives me the opportunity to run one of my most favorite interviews ever with Kiese Laymon for LARB. It ran in July of 2021, when the new edition of Kiese’s novel Long Division was released. The interview held the Number One spot on the Most Popular list for two weeks. Those of you who know me even slightly, know how deeply Kiese’s work moves me. If you haven’t yet read Heavy, I’d suggest dropping everything and reading it now along with his essay collection How To Slowly Kill Yourself And Others In America. You might also want to follow him on social media as he always has something compelling on his mind, and he expresses himself with wisdom, tenderness, and humor. He’s also a devoted advocate for fellow writers, so you’ll learn what books to buy next.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed speaking with Kiese. I sure lucked out with my job!
I FIRST “MET” Kiese Laymon when I messaged him after reading his tender, grief-sodden, yet doggedly hopeful 2018 memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir. I shared that, while our lives were quite different, I somehow found my story within his. As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in this experience: Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal, was named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, among others, and went on to become a best seller. Such is the magic of Laymon’s words. He wrote back, “The same ingredients are a part of all of us. They’re just shaped and distributed differently.”
This magic — this investigation of the various shapes and distributions of humanness — is in full bloom in his new novel, Long Division. The story begins in 2013, with ninth-grader Citoyen “City” Coldson and his schoolmate competing in the contest “Can You Use That Word in a Sentence?” The only two Black participants, they have been brought in to “decorate” the traditionally white event. Bright, eager, and sensitive, City gloriously refuses to use the word “niggardly” in a sentence and winds up an internet sensation. Before being sent to stay with his grandma, City is given an authorless book, entitled Long Division, that takes place in 1985 and features a narrator uncannily like himself, also named City Coldson. This City learns to time travel via a hole in the woods, visiting 2013 before setting off to 1964 to save the grandaddy he never met from the Klan, but complications arise.
This is a story of bone-deep love, enduring racism, a missing girl, the Holy Ghost, loss, sexuality, family (chosen and blood), sacrifice, hope, horror, tenderness, a talking cat, staggering grief, and ridiculous amounts of humor. Long Division was originally published in 2013, though Scribner in June brought out a beautiful new edition. After a disheartening experience with his editor, Laymon bought back his first two books (including also the 2013 essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America) and reissued them in the manner he had always envisioned. Which in the case of Long Division meant rejiggering some of the language and publishing it as a flipbook, or what Laymon calls an “adult workbook.” He says, “I’m glad I could give the characters what they deserve.”
Laymon is an advocate for healing through love; he’s anti-prisons, anti-violence, pro-family (blood and chosen). He’s seemingly trying to leave as gentle and heartening a mark as possible on the planet and her animals, and to help as many folks as possible along the way. Which isn’t to say he’s not outraged by what’s happening in America; indeed, a wondrous combination of love and outrage is what drives his writing. Laymon is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford American, and he has recently joined the faculty at Rice University.
We chatted over Zoom on Easter Sunday.
JANE RATCLIFFE: How difficult it is for you to write about racism?
KIESE LAYMON: Nobody ever asked that question. I need to write about it so I can feel stable. But it’s sort of terrifying to write through what we have done with this idea of race in this world, but definitely in this nation. I try to sometimes lean into the absurdity of it because that’s how I can get through it. I need to laugh through parts of it. But I’m always crying through it. Because it’s all just sort of terrifying.
In keeping with this, your characters tend to speak very plainly, very frankly, and by doing so the truth of the world is revealed. And sometimes that truth is simultaneously horrifying and ridiculous. For instance, when describing Klansmen, City says, “I didn’t know if Mama Lara had ever been beaten by a man in a sheet.” You have so many sentences like this that just state the basic facts. This is a grown man walking around with a sheet over him …
… with a sheet and two eye-holes …
… which is ridiculous, but he’s also very dangerous.
Mississippi is just packed with absurdity. Starting with the colors: you have this big