Something a little Heavy

My Dad gave me this memoir when he was done with it, which, if you read it, will impress you. He did say that there were some scenes that were too much for him, which is fair, and it is exactly these scenes that crash through the ethers, sending shock waves and reverberations back into one’s own past and the bloody evolution of desire wracked by all the lies that the world has taught us for millennia about our bodies and identities generated and sustained by homophobia, racism and misogyny. Yes, I did just have to get up and get my first cup of coffee while writing that paragraph. Thank God I made it strong.

It’s hard to read this book without thinking about Heavy by Kiese Laymon. In fact, Jones thanks Laymon in the acknowledgement and Laymon’s is the last blurb on the back of How We Fight for our Lives’ book jacket. I was hoping to find a picture of them both together on google images this morning, I don’t know, wearing pastel tee shirts with their arms wrapped around each other, grinning hugely under a weeping willow tree even though Laymon is mostly straight and Jones isn’t. Maybe it exists in one of their camera rolls, but not on google. Here is Kiese Laymon.

I’m not trying to be like hey, I’ve read two memoirs by black men so let me lump them together, and I’m not trying to let Heavy hone in on this review just because I read it in one sitting (many months ago, long before quarantine) and when I was done with it, I held my head down ragged over the book, stunned that I had just been made to understand what a human being can do through writing that I had never even imagined was possible. Jones’ book is good all on its own, but they are actually similar in that they are two of the most honest books I have ever read in my life. I was sitting on our front porch yesterday, saying to my partner Julie about these books, “How did they do it? What happens to you if you write a book that is as evisceratingly raw and open as these are?” It makes what Mrs. Maisel goes through with her father look like a total joke, and I relate to this way more superficial level of disclosure with terror.

So I don’t know how they do it or what they have gone through after publishing these books, but thank God they did because my life is better from having read them. I mean I’m such a literary coward in comparison, I am nervous to even figure out how to describe to you what Jones wrote, his freaking story. Ha. Amazing, isn’t it?

He finds himself in a place where a lot of us have been, a college party, the omnipresent red Solo cups filled with keg beer or if you went to a rich school, Old Weller dashed with Coca Cola. You can picture the scene. Is there ever a time when this scene isn’t pulsing on some level with violence? There wasn’t for me, just being a girl, well and a fat girl perhaps more importantly, although my guess is…most any girl will feel it too. At the beginning, Jones seems to be having more fun than I ever did at one of those, even though he was surrounded by white, heterosexual people, only one black woman and one gay couple in attendance at the party. He seems to have some optimism that it could be fun, that he could be himself even if (as I can really relate to) he has to try to be 75% more interesting and funnier to offset the constant downpull of bias based rejection.

Jones and all the other attendees witness a scene with a white man in a bedroom with the one black woman at the party that cannot be interpreted in any other way than riddled with sexist and racist violence even if she consented, and then Jones leaves with him.

What follows is a scene that was understandably too much for my Dad and is the masterpiece that the rest of the book grows out of like a gnarled green and purple thorny vine rising up and over the walls of Jones’ life. I think the bloody, complicated and confounding mess of desire, rage, power, violence, and victimization that he shares with us is something that women experience all the time, which is not at all to minimize his or equate hetero female experiences with those of gay men (nor to equate the experiences of white people with people of color). I say it to thank him. I have never read a woman write about sexual experience like this even though various incarnations of it are lived out constantly because of the masculinity and femininity that we are suckled on.

But wait, you say. I thought you said you didn’t want to read heavy (Heavy?) stuff especially not during quarantine because you don’t want to be more depressed after reading than before? I thought you were only going to review stuff for us that would make us feel better?

Well, my dears, I do feel better after reading this. There is this incredible power in reaching down through the muck and mire of the oppressions that have blunted us from life, shoving our fist through those bloody brambles, reaching down and pulling out of the ground our own hearts, covered in loam, but still beating. Don’t we need that more than ever right now? I mean, I’m sure as hell not going to write that book at the moment, but thank God Jones did.