Flying and Crashing

my eyes. You made me feel like the most beautiful black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn't. That's Kisa Layman reading a passage from his masterful memoir Heavy, a memoir that has been receiving just about every accolade a book can get. I sat down with Kis on a chilly summer morning in the mountains at the Aspen Ideas for staff. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets.

The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. Whoa you start big huh? The landscape of my childhood. So that's a great question. You know, my my parents were nineteen and twenty when I was born on the campus of Jackson State University. My mom claims the first time she had sexually got pregnant. My father claims the first time he had sex, they got pregnant, and then they went

on to go to grad school University Wisconsin. When when they went there, I was there for a little bit and I want to stay with my grandmother and that rule black town majority black town called far Ast, Mississippi. And then when my mother and my parents my father got separated, my mother moved to Jackson, and then I came up from Forest, Mississippi to stay with her in Jackson around eighties, so like six or seven. Um, So, like my early early childhood was like partially in Jackson,

a little Tason, Wisconsin. And most of my memories of my childhood are in Farest, Mississippi, partially because of my grandmother. Mean, the landscape was kind of cool, but my grandmother was just you know, complicated. She was just really good at loving, really good at record being, really good at keeping secrets. Um. So for me, she is my She is the landscape

of my childhood. And then when when my mom came and got me, moved to Jackson, Um, you know, she was very young single, so you know, I watched her the young black woman in Mississippi go through with a lot of young black single women in Mississippi go through, lots of heartbreak, lots of economic procarity. We moved around a lot. The only thing that was actually solid was just her pushing book and writing on me and disciplined me if I didn't do with the books and writing

what she wanted to. So my landscape is like it's filled with Grandma is ms, is filled with my mom pushing education. I don't really have many memories of my father being there. I know he was there, you know. No. One memory I do have is that he froze a snowball when we lived in Wisconsin for a little while and he broke it back out in the summer. We had a snowball fight. That's the only member I had with my father before I was eight. But he was there.

I just don't remember him unless pictures trigger some memory. But I don't know if that's make believer actual. And then the rest of my sort of childhood is just living with Mama, just trying to watch her go from like really a girl to a young woman to a to a woman, and watch her teach while I was just trying to do it. Most kids are trying to do, you know, figure out life, deal with puberty, figure out my feelings from my mother. We were so tight. I

was a big boy. People always thought that was my sister. Man would always come up to me and asked me for my sister's numbers. I would get upset up about that, but yeah, we were very close. Variants. We slept in the same bed for a long time, do you know what I'm saying? And I think that sort of heightened a lot of the things that came post essays. Mother is an academic, a college professor. She's consumed with elevating

Kisa and protecting him. She insists that he speaks proper English, the King's English, because that's how educated people, white people speak.

She's not just Kissa's mom, she's his teacher. She gives him assignments to write papers, for instance, one about the politicians Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, and another to read the first chapter of William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom and then imitate Faulkner's style, and Kisa knows he'd better complete those assignments in a timely manner or else that's just gonna have to laugh and always have to laugh before I talk about that, right, Like, it's not even it's

just it's just bodily. You know. When I was really young and she gave me lots of assignments. If I got them wrong, she sit down with me and we would revive we get it right. Um. But when when when she moved back to Jackson for a few years and I met a man that she would fall in love with, who's a really powerful man in my city. Uh, the or else is became a lot more physical and

a lot more emotionally abrasive. I think sometimes it made this distinction between physical abuse and emotional abuse, but I don't. I've got lots of whims in my life, and they were all emotional in addition to being physical. And when people have emotionally abused me, or if I've been emotionally abusive to people have seen the physical manifestations of it.

So I'm saying, yeah, there's a lot of physical abuses, emotional abuse, and some of it had to do was because she was afraid that if I didn't master she called the King's English, the white people, white police, white teachers, what whatever, would go harder on me. That was definitely something she believed. She got that from her grandma. And then it was just a lot of like, my life isn't fucking shambles, Like this dude is terrorizing me. I

cannot effectively terrorize him. I go home to this big black boy who was my son, who I love more than by in the world. He's kind of hard head. He's not doing what I wanted to do. And you know, I don't want to mythologize. The beatings are whippings. I don't have children. Part of the reason I don't have children because I'm afraid. I don't want to punish my children. Never ever, ever would put my hands on my kids.

But I just noticed a lot of different ways to use people other than that, and so my mother she just started to, like, you know, beat me a lot um for things that she said I was doing wrong. But also when she and her partner got into it, I just knew I was gonna get it, you know. And and sometimes it was because I didn't do my homework. Sometimes it would be like key, when I was away, I noticed that my bed wasn't made up. Did you get in my bed? Were you in the bed with

the babysitter? And this was actually before I was in bed with the babysitter, and I was like, no, I wasn't in bed with the babysitter. Mama, yes you were. But I realized early that my mom had a hard time with her partner. I was gonna get it somehow or another. She was gonna take it out on me. And and then after I got it, she was gonna apologize, She was gonna hold me tight. We were gonna she was gonna, you know, and that I always am. I

tell her that I said this in a book. That was the confusing part, because I loved him more than anything in the world. I was my first teacher, my best friend, anything you can imagine, you know what I'm saying. And I just was like, man, I would never ever strike my mother. And at that point I was as big as she was. And then I was like, I don't really want to hurt my mom at all. At

that point. But when I you know, when I got to high school, like most high schoolers, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna get you back by doing stuff like trying to have sex with my girlfriend in her bed when she wasn't there, you know, breaking into the house, getting terrible gray like all of these things that I know would hurt her without physically, And I would never cuss out anything, but you know, I was trying to hurt her.

I was trying to retaliate for what I felt was like unfair treatment, and I want be held accountable for that tool do you know what I'm saying? Not just as I'm not saying it's the same sort of abusiveness, but I was definitely trying to hurt my mom without touching her. Do you think you knew that then or do you know it now? I mean I want to say I didn't know what I was doing, but I knew what I was doing. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, there's so many seas, you know, there's so many I mean,

this is all families. There's so many secrets. But my mother and I never talked about sex, and she had a hard time, like keeping money, so we were the type of family who are like, we'd have cable TV one month out of the year and then she wouldn't pay the bill and then the ship would be gone. Right, But when we had it, Remember one time she called me, I don't know if you remember this, but if you if you did not have cinemax and you turn the cinemax,

it would be all blurry. Do you know what I'm skinnamax dudel kind of make out Nikki people in there. So one time she saw me watching cinemax. Really, I mean, it wasn't you coudn't see anything? She said, what are you watching? Keep I'm like nothing, And then she kind of a us sort of conversation with me about pornography, and I was like, oh, my mama doesn't like me to watch NIKKEI things so right. So we didn't have a VCR. I brought my my friends VCR. His father

had all these porn tapes. I brought him to my house, snug him in my room, and watched something that night. But I left it there in my room. Of course, I wanted her to see it, and when I got home, I got it. Do you know what I'm saying? Changed his schools in middle school and ends up one of a small number of black students in a predominantly white school.

Well we knew, I mean, you know, we we're never going to school with white kids before and in the Mississippi, you know, whiteness, a particular kind of whiteness, is pervasive. And we all had televisions and we went to the movie, so you know, we weren't unfamiliar with whiteness and white people. We were we were unfamiliar with real white people. And because we didn't have any contact with real white folks, you know, we knew Jack Tripper and Laverne as surely

and all the cartoons. You can imagine. It isn't a happy situation. And k s A's grades start falling. His mother gets his report card and becomes physically abusive, but she only strikes him in places on his body where bruises won't be seen. This is something Kis and his friends the other black students have in common. They talk openly with each other about the difference between getting a whooping,

getting a beating, and getting beaten the funk up. I mean, I wasn't the only kid who went from getting those beatings, like where you could come to school and you can see the wells on people's bodies. And again, my culture, and I think American culture generally even didn't one admitute like we use human to kind of sue. Right. So back with other school we would come to school and we'll be like, yo, you got a web in his morning, you know, like laughing. And at St. Richard to school

I went to. If I acted up and my mom daught I acted up, you know, she would get me in play is. It's complicated because we also had to wear uniforms, so you know there were long sleeve shirts and stuff like that. But she definitely would not get me on my neck, you know, she wouldn't get me anywhere in my face because she didn't want those white people to think to pathologize her and us, and she didn't want them to be like, oh, look at these poor black kids come to school with wels on their body.

And that happened to me, and that was and that happened to a lot of people. But what's important is that you know, by eighth grade, you know, I played a lot of sports. I was like eighth grade, I was like five ten, two oh five, five eleven, two oh five. My mom was five four hundred, So I just think it's something very very very unspoken and intimate

about the ways. I don't know how much of it has to do with race either, but like sometimes smaller parents, you know, beat up on bigger kids, and for me, like I was bigger than her partner too, you know, so she was part of me. Thinks she thought she could not hurt me. That's what I want to believe, that she was hitting me like that because she thought it was so big and she couldn't hurt me. But actually, no, that's not true, because I let her know early on

that it did hurt. But then after a while it stopped hurting and stopped hurting because I was so angry she tried to hit me. I just catched a belt. Just look at her. She keep on doing I just catched the belt, and you know, one point, I called her not threw it, and I looked at her in a way for the first time my life where I was like, nah, it's not gonna happen again. I was never gonna touch my mom, but I just wanted her to know that, like, you know, I'm You're not just

gonna beat me I mean, I'm done. I'm letting you beat me, right, you know you can. You can keep trying to beat me, but it's not gonna work anymore. You know, it strikes me as you're talking about this that there was something that there's like an element of it that was like ritual, absolutely, because you each had these different roles to play and and both were controlled. Like your mom was controlled in that she didn't hit certain parts of your body. She wasn't out of control.

You know, it's so profoundly complicated at it because in the dynamic between k. S A and his mom, she's acting out of a kind of maternal terror, but that maternal terror actually terrorizes her son. She knows what can happen to young black men, and so she tries to teach k. S A to write and learn and think his way towards protection. But protection isn't possible, so she beats him. It makes all kinds of sense and no kinds of sense, something he explores in his book Heavy.

I think the story is much more complicated. Right then, young black mother beats big black son. Big Black Son becomes a writer and writes about the beatings. Right. The book is about much more than that. But but, but the odd part about it is that my mom's fear was that that the nation and my state, white supremacy, white power manifested in my state in the nation, would harm me in ways she could never and she wanted to protect me. Like I grew up in the era

where police officers would come to your school. They'd be called officer, and they bring up sometimes the biggest kid in the school, make an example of him. If you don't do right, this is how we're gonna treat you. Okay, fine, But you know I had a lot of problems in high school. I didn't but drinking wasn't one of my problems. Smoking wasn't one of my problems. I saw how addiction ravaged my family. I wasn't about to do that. But

cops still jack me up saying I had cracked. Cops still would be like, I saw you throw crack out of a window. You know what I'm saying. Cops would still like have me embarrassed outside of the road, handcuffed in front of people. And I know how people think people dry body said a big black boy in handcuffs, They're gonna be like, oh, that mocker there's something wrong. Often I never I'm not trying. Ian. I am not

somebody who bleeds innocent. I'm not innocent, but I am definitely innocent of ever doing anything or police officers that I did, But that didn't stop me from calling them negative and stopped them from putting guns to my face guns to my head several times before I was eighteen years old. This reminds me of something kiss mother says to him before he starts school at St. Richard's. Here's Kisa.

I sat in the principal's office thinking about what you told me the day before we started, saying, Richard, be twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this point on. You said everything you thought your new changes tomorrow. Being twice as excellent as white folks will get you half of what they get. Being anything less will get

you hell. I assume we were already twice as excellent as the white kids at St. Richard's, precisely because their library looked like a cathedral and ours was an old trailer on cinder blocks. I thought you should have told me to be twice as excellent as you, my grandmama, since y'all were the most excellent people I knew. I got kicked out of school for taking a library book out of the library. And I just think it's interesting because my mom's belief was that, like, if you immerse

yourself in books, you can protect yourself from them. And what I learned, like eighteen nineteen, is that sometimes sometimes the appearance of being like well read or uppity or whatever to police officers or white folks don't have your best interests at would make them punish you more. You know, I got I got kicked out of school, literally for taking the library book out of the library that I

paid to go to and taking it back. It was all on the news, so it embarrassed my grandmama because it looked like her grandson got kicked out of school for theft. That was the most painful thing to happen in my family at the time because it was so public and it was and I didn't do I didn't I took a library book and I brought it back.

You know what I'm saying something. My point is she was right that these people won't do whatever they could to harm and hurt me and people who look like me, But she was wrong in that, like the meetings would help because when that should happen to me, what I wanted to do is fight them. I wanted to I wanted to physically fight them. When you put handcuffs on me, I'm gonna try to. I am gonna try to fight back.

And that's gonna make it worse. Do you see what I'm saying, Because I was talking like you do fight? You fight? You fight when people do things wrong, do you fight. You can't fight the police unless you have guns. I didn't have guns. We're going to take a short break. His mom tries hard to control the unruly son she loves so much, pushing him to read right, speak quote unquote properly. But then there's another way she tries to control him, having to do with food, what and how

much he eats. My mama was somebody who just like his adamant and she was that I read all these books. She was equally admit that I don't eat um, not that I start myself, but like I only eat it like asparagus, and I mean when I'm like between eight and fourteen years old asparagus. And she like Brussels sprouts. And her money was really weird too, so she would buy like all this booty food we really couldn't afford

at the beginning of the month. I lives in fucking pump and nickel brow, Like no twelve year old, I didn't know. I didn't know what's over? Who want to eat that kind of ship? And I definitely didn't want to eat that um. But it's signified the same thing as the King's English. Absolutely, she really believed that if you ate light white people, read light white people, walk like white people, you can protect yourself a white people.

But she raised a kid who was like sort of curious, you know, I always just I was like, my look at dr King like they blew his damn head off, damn near and he was. He dressed well, he had like a beautiful Southern twine, but he was one of the most eloquent speakers ever. Right, look at you, Mama, like you do speak to kings English in public, and I can see you suffering. So this sort of like deprivation in the hopes that the deprivation will make you less scary. I don't know. Maybe it works, but it

didn't work for me. So when I left my mama's house, partially because the food she she did have in the house if we have food was not it was kind of like not gross, it was gross, you know what I'm saying to me? And I go to my friend's house yea, and they have you know, Golden Graham and like all kind of like those little frozen hamburgers in the box you can sizzlin and that. So I would just I just I just eight and eight and eight.

Whenever I left with my grandmother, who cooked a lot of healthy food because she had a massive garden, but she also like like to cook cars and cake. Did she encourage me to eat? And I never heard the word fat in her house from her, Do you know what I'm saying. So I'm going to say, yes, I was trying to protect myself, but also part of me was trying to push back. I guess my mom's like I think easy mode of discipline, which was like a

kind of like deprivation. There's a way in which I think certain things lodge in the body, right, Like I have a long time yoga practice, and one of the things that the yogis won't say is that certain emotional states actually live in the body. Like if you do like a a hip opening pose eventually, if you stay in it long enough, grief will like start to rise to the surface. You know, you'll actually start to cry.

I mean, I've experienced like the ways in which certain emotional states kind of sit dormant, you know, but like their stories, they're complete. The Yogis called them some saras or, which also translates a scar interestingly, like they live within us. And I think when we are driven or there's a kind of undercurrent of shame that most of us experienced some degree or another, whether we're in touch with it or not. That is kind of like the river beneath

you know, sort of our our daily existence. It manifests

itself in somewhere or another. And how we feel about our bodies, and in your case, to the becoming bigger and the way that on the one hand it sort of afforded you a certain kind of weight, you know, of protection, and on the other hand seemed to also have go along with it a not feeling great about your body, or feeling like, you know, girls wouldn't want to be with you because of your body, yea, or or that they would because they were scared, which was

I mean, And and there's no there's no evidence to substantiate it, but that's what I felt, do you know what I mean, Like even to this day. I mean I was an interview and I said this before, so I guess I can say it here. It's just like, you know, I never felt comfortable even when we would play like these games when we were like eight. It was called high talked about this but kind of go getting you go, you hide, and then whoever it was

a person has has to confine people. And the whole point is that like young people are in the closets or hallways and it's dark and you get to touch people. I was just always afraid to touch anybody one because I was just bigger, and but I wasn't afraid to want to be touched. But you know, when I started to get older in hip puberty, like most people, like you know, desire was a thing, but I just never felt comfortable. Um what did they used to call it?

Making a move or passing a note? Did you like me? Circle yes or no? Like you know, none of that kind of shif. It was just I just thought that people, if if particularly if young girls you know, who were twelve my age liked me at the time, I thought it was because they thought I was going to hurt them. But there's no reason for me to think that other than I mean, there are reasons for me to think that, right, But I never had anybody be like I thought you

would hurt me if you didn't blah blah blah. Well, and of course you also equated, you know, loving and being hurt. So k s A gets kicked out of school for theft of a book. Even with his complicated academic history, he manages to transfer from his first college, Millsaps, to Oberlin, a school that recognizes his gifts his potential, but it's all coming at a high price. In his desire to change himself, he starts to radically change his body in unhealthy ways at the highest in Millsaps. In

my first college, I was like three nine pounds. By the time I get to Old Milan, I'm two hundred and nine pounds, Like first day of school, and nobody looked at me and thought that I could ever been. I was like a very athletic two nine pounds, and then I started to lose more ways. They're not going to nine or one nine nine? What was the turning point? What was what do you remember about the moment where you're like, I'm now going to start eating differently, exercising,

and I'm gonna I'm gonna lose that weight. I'm gonna go in there and be this smaller person. I just wanted absolute control over my body because my body was in Oberland, Ohio, because some white man decided that he didn't want me at his school. Do you see what I'm saying? And there weren't enough people around who all saw that the ship was wrong, who fought enough to make it happen. That meant, like I had, I needed to protect myself somehow. And so it wasn't just the eating,

but my writing ritual kicked up. You know, started writing two hours before nine a row, three in the morning, three to night. I read. I ran in the morning, I ran at night, and then you know, I got sick. I got up. That's what Seeing that the number go down, it felt so good. I played back. You know, it's Captaine the basketball team. I weighed myself before the games. I wash myself after the game. If I didn't lose eight pounds of water weight during the game, I go

on the song and run more. I just was like, yo, I can control, and I was trying to hurt myself, like I'm not trying to put this on other people. But you know, if you play any sort of athletics in college B A, D, three D two or three one, they're gonna run you to death. And if you run on top of that, it's not gonna be good for your body. Do you know what I'm saying? And I

just I wanted to be smaller. And then I just started to get all of this crazy attention from not just women, but women, from queer boys, from supposed straight bowl a people were just like, oh my god, you look so good, and I would I was dysmorphotuld I was like, what, you know, I still thought I looked like I looked at three pounds. And then one day, you know, we're looking at tape for basketball, and I saw myself on tape, and you know, I was like, I'm gonna look good. But you know, I was very

musculine and very lean and very fast. And I just remember sitting in that room with those my friends and just like crying in your back because I was just like, what the like, you just created a body without even know when you created a body. But at what what cost. People just stopped treating me like I was fat. That's why I can't even imagine what it feels like for women to be treated that way, because I think men get treated a lot nicer. But I just people stopped

treating me like I was fat. So they stopped treating me like a particular kind of threat, which meant that I could do much more harmed at people because they weren't. They weren't they were disarmed because oh this guy, so you know what I'm saying. So that's when I started to realize that sometimes those kinds of people could do the most harm to different people, like those really attractive, supposedly well read people who listened. And that's who I was. I was a great in a great shape. I read

a lot books. I love to listen, And then no one would have known what was going like what was going on, you know, inside of you. And there's this there's this line in your book right around the time you get to Oberlin, I will not tell those friends what my body remembered. I will become a handsome, fine together brother with lots of secrets. There's also this line, flying and crashing were what people in our family did when we were alone, ashamed and scared to death flying

and crashing. You know, it's kind of what we've been talking about too, right, It's like both you can't fly, you can't just fly, not okay, not possible to just fly, trying to find a way to crash. I'm trying to embody like. To me, at that point, that was like passing judgment on my family for being fat and for being gambling addicted, and for my grandmother like she was a cutter, like she used to hurt herself. So at that point in the book, I'm saying, I'm so happy

I'm not like them. While that whole chapter is about it's about body is morpha is about it and erected about beliemia. There's a recurrent line in that chapter, I just love losing weight. So, you know, I wanted people to understand that the book was not passing judgment on my family, But that's how fucked up I was, Like I'd gotten out of that. I'm the skinny dude, I'm in grad school, I'm about to go to teach Vasser. Here, my grandmama is in the hospital, she can't take care

of herself. Here, my mama is. She can't take care of her money. Here, my whole family is are all you know, according to doctors, morri Lee obese. But here I am in great shape, grad school, got everything going on for me. But I'm just trying to disappear, you know, just trying hard as I can to disappear. But I didn't have that language. So ks A graduates from Oberlin

and gets his first teaching job. His mother has instilled in him not only a sensitivity to words and language, but to teaching as a vocation, and he lands a great position at Vassar College. Now, Vasser is about as far landscape wise from Jackson, Mississippi as you can get while still staying in the United States. It's a culture, I know well, a small liberal arts college in New York State's Hudson Valley, all red brick buildings, white columns, arches,

and shady paths. It's here at Vasser that kas eating disorder grows even more dangerous. You're six one and you're a d pounds and you're running, you know, dozens of miles a day, checking my body every day, checking your body fat. It's at one point, it's two. So during those years at Vasser. There's a moment where your mother comes visits you. She's very proud of you, you know, And which is interesting too, because it's so much about

what do we see when we see other people. What she sees when she sees you at Vasser is that it all, It all works. Everything she ever wanted, It all works. Institution and all that disciplining and reading that she did. What your mother sees when she sees you in Poughkeepsie is that. But of course that's not what it is at all. Oh No, I mean the hard part about all of that is that some of that

coincides with the Obama ascensionvention. Thing about Obama is that, like there was no imadinitive template for him before he becomes president, right, nobody's like that, or we want this guy with his African name from Chicago, used to be community organized and married, beautiful black woman, um to be president. Nobody's talking about that ship, right, But that's what she wanted.

She wanted she I mean when I say that, she wanted in terms of his body, in terms of how he speaks, in terms of how he manages white people, like we've rarely seen Obama. I think honestly respond to some of the white terret it has been put on his back, right. And as soon as O, Mamma gota like that, she starts crying because she's like, they're gonna kill him. But I'm like, Mama, that's who you wanted

me to be. You wanted me to be this dude, so like something doesn't make sense, Okay, just be safe, do you see what I'm saying. So life was incredible at Vaster because of my relationship with my students. You know, I get the job at Vaster when I'm almost twenty six. Most of my colleagues are older than my grandmama. That's no distourd that that I'm trying to dis the grandmama age people. What I'm saying when you're twenty six and you come in, you know, you're talking about isolation and

a loneness. I went there alone, and the people I had the most uncommon with were my students, right, And lots of those students had never been taught by a professor who was not white, and they definitely have been taught by like a young black person. So they, I mean, lots of the white ones did, but lots of the folks of color, particularly black students like found safety and me right. And I was teaching James Harlan, which is ironic because bad one is always talk about teaching us

we need to record with our past. Our past has never passed. It is always in us talking about love and all my classes. Meanwhile, I'm like, I'm literally trying to disappear. I'm literally trying to kill myself right, And the only reason I did not it's because of my body stopped working by like my legs stopped. I could not run anymore because if I could have run, I would have run myself into nothingness. But my legs stopped.

But the most shameful part of it to me is that while I'm teaching these creative writing courses and teaching these English lit courses, teach the African American led courses to these students who would listen and believe anything I say, I'm being wholly dishonest to them, coolly dishonest to them. And I just if I could do it over again, I would doubts what I would do over again. I

don't think I was fair to those kids. I know those kids love me, and like I wanted, I'm not saying they wanted me to sit down and give him my whole life story. But I was just lying to them all the time. I just lied every I mean just teaches that a lot of teaches a lot of kids. But but they expected more for me. And you know, those students love me, they care for me. Um. But I didn't do right by them, partially because personally, because I was sick and I needed them a lot more

than I let on. I didn't want to be hanging with the fucking sixty five year old white dudes with the beards and ship talking about what kind of new vest they were gonna wear next week. That wasn't what I was interested in. As I listened to k S, I can't help but think he's being too hard on himself. I've been teaching all my writing life as well, and it's a complex dance we teachers do, modeling what you can impart as a teacher. It's not as simple as

you're either walking the walk or you're not. Sometimes you're trying to impart something to your students from a place of your own longing, a place of be better, be better than I am. Right now, let me be clear about they want to because I'm kind of talking around what I what I really want to say. They would want to hear me say I know what you're feeling because I've been there, and I would not. I would talk to them about a lot of things that at

them in the parts of who I was. But when they started talking about like their relationships with eating disorders, their relationships with sexual violence, their relationships with parental abuse, and they would ask me, I literally would say, you know, I don't have that experience, but I definitely hear you. I would literally lie. And part of that as big pedog, actually, I wasn't sure what you you know, like do you give that or do you But what you don't do

is lie. And what I should have done is been like, you know, I've experienced that kind of stuff too, but I'm not sure that this relationship can hold my giving that to you, so if you want to continue, and what I really should have done, it's like there's a counselor center right over there. Let me hold your hand,

let's walk over there together. My students would come be like, you know, like I did this, you know, And because I wanted to be everything to them, I never was like I don't know how to help you now, but these people do. So that's what I'm trying to say when I'm saying they were open to me partially because of my age, because of how I look, because I'm a race, because I did care, but they gave me opportunity after opportunity to talk about the stuff. I talked about.

It heavy, and I'm not saying I should have put that on them, but I don't know if I should lie. This is one of the things I hear again and again when it comes to family secrets, whether it's the people who have been coming to my events for Inheritance or my guests on this podcast. So often folks who have been part of a secret end up becoming secret keepers too. So Key say is keeping his own secret, which is that he's not okay. I mean, he's really

not okay. There's this way in which all of these things were tied up together for you in this really complicated stew and then it becomes like the work of a lifetime. I mean, that's the way that I think of it is. We like Hollywood endings, we like fairytale endings. Um, we like the whole idea that there's like some kind of bright line between you know, before and after. And and that's something you were trying to do with your body too, righte Like now pounds, nothing's going to touch me.

And meanwhile, you're mean the same exact thing, it just looked different on the outside. We're going to take a quick break. So when Kisa's mom makes that visit to vass her, it ought to be a triumphant moment, a transcendent moment. He's done it right. Her son is an accomplished, tenured professor, a published writer, a thin, elegant black man who speaks the King's English, all of which makes him untouchable, right right, kiss mother takes him shopping and insists on

buying him expensive furniture for his home. He doesn't want her to do it, but she does. And then when she returns home to Jackson, she starts asking him for money, more and more money. And he'd be ends to wonder if she has a gambling problem. I mean, it wouldn't surprise him. He could imagine anyone in his family being an addict, crashing and flying, crashing and flying. What he couldn't imagine was that his mother might be stealing from him. But then she asks him for money for house repairs

and something doesn't seem quite right. Nothing in the world she could ask me for it that I would say, no, nothing. She could ask me for fifty g s if I had forty nine, I go get the other g from somebody and give it to it. And when that situation happened at the house, when she was asking me for some money to fix the foundation and to fix a chimney, uh, the first time in my life, I questioned. I was like, Okay, well, can I just talk to the contractor guy so I

can try to get the price down? And she hung up the phone. And then she calls back and she's like, hey, I need the money. You don't give it to me not And I was like, uh, Mama, can I just talk to the person to see where the money is going? She hung up the phone again, so I called Grandma. Grandma. Mama said that the needs breaking in the foundations messed up. Grandma was like, no, I'm just over there. Ain't not

going on all day. I mean, thank goodness, children can be this sort of like, I don't believe in innocence, but I think sometimes we can really believe that our parents would not attempt to do financial harm to us.

And I don't know how to explain it, but like, ain't nothing in my heart broke like that in my life when I realized, Oh, my mom, for for reasons that are beyond her, is still in for me, and still in from my Grandma, the two people on earth who would never ever, ever ever still from her, who would do anything possible to give to her. I didn't

understand gambling addiction at the time. He s A has no idea how long his mother's gambling has been going on, but as he thinks back through their history, it starts to make sense that it's been there for a long time, in the background. After the whoopings, the beatings, the various minds of abuse, this realization that his mother had been stealing from him makes him crazy his word, that's how

he describes it. He rethinks some of his history with her, and at the same time, his body is breaking down. He has herniated discs from all the punishing physical exertion, and an abnormal growth on his left hip. But still he tries to burn calories, moving his arms, trying to sweat, trying to control the life that's burning all around him.

So one of the reasons I wrote that book was because I think my mother and my father have had, like lots of parents in this country have had different relationships with addiction, but most of the ones I know have never attempted to publicly articulate that journey, not just for readers, but two people they love. I told I was writing it too. She told me she didn't think that was a good idea. Asked lots of questions that

we never talked about. She answered some she dinna answer some, I'll talk to my grandmother, And my grandmother pretty much answered all the questions that I add that I had the nerve to ask. And then I just had all this stuff, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna trying to create a piece of art, not like a tell all, because there's so much, like the most dramatic stuff in that that that I think happened in that time period. The three most dramatic things are not in that book.

But you know, it's just like an artful rendering, but also an artful attempt to get us to love each other, to save each other, to not give our money away, to know that we're valuable enough to at least talk through pain, which is something I just think we are not good at. We don't know how to talk through pain. You alluded to it, but when when you realize that you're you think your mother was trying to just basically

steal from you. That coincided with your body falling apart around that same time, and then you began putting weight back on. Yeah, I mean yes, that struck me as actually a good thing for you. When I got to that part, it is like, oh, he's gonna let this go now, like this form of masochistic you know, self destructive body punishing. Um. Did it feel that way to you? No, In a moment, it felt just shameful because everybody because only people, because the people who knew me there, they

only knew me as a skinny person. So they were just like, what's wrong with you? Do you know what I mean? And this is when like they this is when I went from one fifty nine, one eight nine or one seventy nine, they'd be like, are you okay? And I'm like, I'm good. What that literally, I'm not gonna this is not hyperboly. That's just say my life by that ship means the one to punch of his body breaking down, and his discovery that his mom had been stealing from him. This was the lowest point at

which it became possible to begin again. If my legs allowed me to, I would have run myself into disappearing, is no doubt. And and so I did not get healthy because I started to like just try to punish myself with food. But I mean should I wouldn't have been here right now had that not happened. I just want my mother to be better at loving one another, and I want us supposed to be better at talking sincerely.

I don't think sincerity is something that we don't talk about enough in his college Sincerely about joy, sincerely about pain. The day before K. S. A And I had this conversation, he received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. This award is a big deal in the literary world, and kiss Mom was in the audience. As he accepted the award, he asked her to join him on stage.

I wish I could have seen it. This remarkable mother and son who continue, because of everything, despite everything, to stumble toward one another in all their humanness. I wrote this book as offering being Mama, can we talk? And sometimes she says yes, and most of the times she says no. But at least Lease is out there and we've got opportunity. Now. I'd like to thank my guest K. S A. Lehman for telling his story. You can find out more about his book Heavy at K. S A.

Lehman dot com. That's Key I E S E l A Y m O N dot com. I'd also like to thank the Aspen Institute Arts Program and Aspen Words, where this interview was recorded. Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Lowell Bolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the

executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Right, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.