This is a book I want to own, so I can underline passages. It's so good I ended up giving up on another book I was also reading, because it paled in comparison. Kiese Laymon writes about growing up Black and poor in Mississippi, raised by his Grandma and his single mom, to whom the book is addressed in the second person. He includes experiences of physical and sexual abuse, as well other body-related traumas such as eating disorders. He writes of a gambling addiction and other self-sabotage. It feels trite to call these introspections honest or raw or hard-won, though they are those things. As Laymon asks near the end of the book, "Can we just not lie?"

This book is also about Laymon's education as a writer, reader, and thinker. His mother (a professor at Jackson State University working towards her PhD through most of childhood) assigned him reading and essays on top of his normal school work, edited his pieces, and impressed on him the importance of writing, re-writing, re-reading, revising. Laymon highlights moments in which certain concepts or words entered his vocabulary, the phases in which he became proficient at writing about various parts of his experience.

This is also a book about racism, and the unconscionable levels of racist violence and oppression in this country, on which this country was founded, and which is woven into every single system of power, including the education system. Laymon was impacted by this as elementary school student, as a high school student, as a college student, and as a tenure track professor trying to meet the needs of students just as marginalized as he was.

For anyone who loves memoir, or who writes memoir, this is a masterful example. I'm definitely planning to check out Laymon's other books as well.