White people in the US have been so violent to black folk, and there is a belief that if we present ourselves as perfect, we have a better chance of coming home, of not suffering, of getting more access to healthy choices and second chances. Your mother wanted to protect you from the things that can happen to black boys – incarceration, gang violence, police violence. One of the most useful things that people like Kavanaugh and Trump show us is that having lots of money, a two-parent family and going to the best schools doesn’t necessarily produce the best men. Would Trump be a better man if he was raised by women? There’s absolutely no proof that that man loves America. We can talk about the difference between black and white or Democrats and Republicans but if we don’t learn to love the people we purport to love, we have no chance.

But their ability to love is why I’m talking to you today. My grandmother, mother and aunt were pretty good at loving. A present father wouldn’t have helped me at all, if he was modelling harmful behaviour daily. We hear about absent fathers but not present mothers. You were raised by women – your mother and grandma – how was that? Laymon teaches creative writing at the University of Mississippi. The New York Times described it as “a gorgeous, gutting book that’s fuelled by candour yet freighted with ambivalence”. It’s a story about the weight of lies, secrecy and expectation and was shortlisted for the Kirkus prize and the Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence. In the book he comes clean about all they have kept from each other: the gambling addiction they both have but never acknowledge his eating disorders and the sexual violence he experienced as a child.

Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, is about his childhood in Mississippi and is written in the form of a letter to his single mother, an academic, who loved him but also beat him ruthlessly for fear of what white America would do to him if he wasn’t perfect.

Kiese laymon heavy