By Barbara Phillips
In 2018, I realized after reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy , a universally lauded memoir, that my writing came from paddling around in honesty’s shallow waters.
As a novice writer of memoir, the essays I’ve written reflect the standard line, “write what you know.” Meanwhile, Kiese’s writing came from the terrifying deep end of the emotional honesty pool, and I just about quit in despair of having the courage to get there.
Kiese introduces Heavy with direct address to his mother that foreshadows the avalanche of vulnerability to follow:
I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie.
I wanted to write a lie.
You wanted to read that lie.
I wrote this to you instead.
Kiese moved to my town of Mississippi to join the university English faculty several years before Heavy was published. He lived here, a town proud of itself as a literary Mecca, where we knew one another in that casual way of small-town life. Then came Heavy rendering him butt-naked in every way that mattered while his mother and grandmother were still alive to read it. He wasn’t some distant New York Times best-selling author, he was my hometown “regular guy”—a Black Southerner like me—who had to know a lot of people here would be saying “Bless your heart” about that book.
I wondered what I would say to him next time I saw him. What do you say to a naked man in public?
The day he was to read from and talk about Heavy at Square Books, our independent bookstore, I watched him move through the audience to the stage with the same mellow amble he always had walking around the Square. He showed us a writer who dares to go underneath what he’s thinking. He swims into his feelings and through to truths about everything and everyone, including himself, and then wraps his arms around all the hurt and joy of his entire world. At Square Books that night, I saw a writer who was comfortable and at ease with sharing the curiosity, love and courage to know and love himself and all that makes us human.
I sat there wondering if I had the courage to know myself, love myself and share myself through writing as he does.
I went home, read Heavy again, and realized his first chapter spoke as directly to me as to his mother. I, too, had wanted to write an American memoir. What I had written in my rejected essays, memoir vignettes and works-in-progress was mostly what Kiese would call lies. And what I had to show for those lies was a pile of rejections without so much as an encouraging word.
There were signs of honesty in some of my writing, reflecting my willingness to see and accept myself—as if I were looking at my own reflection in the mirror without make-up and then venturing out to the Kroger that way. But Kiese’s honesty with himself—and us—illuminated just how timid and superficial my vignettes were.
There must be many ways to go around Memory’s attempts to defend our egos—to shield us from what really happened, our part in it, and how we really felt.
My method was to read my journals going back to ninth grade.
I met myself as a self-centered teenager in Memphis. I kept reading and met another “Me” whose stories contradicted the versions I’d been telling myself for years. Then I met yet another “Me” who underneath it all actually knew her truths. I learned that what I understand of my life and myself depends upon breaking through my own mythology.
I took up my pen and once again, slowly, began to know the truth of myself, of my life, and to wrap my arms around all the hurt and joy of my world.
One experience begged to be examined. For years, I’d told myself I ended my marriage because my husband and I disagreed about having children. That story became Memory’s protection from the more complicated truth. Pushed by Kiese, I reread my journals from that period and found that a few months before walking out of my marriage, I had experienced the death of a dear friend. I filled pages with anxiety and fears about the future. Instead of sharing the messiness of those feelings with my husband, I kept them bottled up—and they became the fuel for my escape from the intimacy of marriage.
In allowing the journals to teach me, I discovered who I was then. When I undertook to write an essay about it, I allowed “Me” to teach me about myself. Kiese had showed me how I could love her—and the essay came closer to art by marrying craft with truth.
I sent all that vulnerability out for publication knowing I’d be walking around naked.
As I continue to swim toward the deep end of the pool, I’m writing more memoir vignettes and sending them out to be published, and now there’s a good sprinkling of acceptances among the rejections.
Kiese doesn’t live in my town anymore, but I’m comfortable ambling around the Square butt-naked, feeling connected with everyone’s humanity. Kiese showed me how at Square Books: Come join me .
Nina Simone sings, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free.”
I think it feels like this.
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Barbara Phillips is a social justice feminist and emerging writer published in Herstry ; New York Times ; Southern Cultures; The Citron Review; 2023 Anthology Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor and others. A former civil rights lawyer, law professor and Ford Foundation Program Officer, she lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
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