How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays (2013) is a collection of 13 essays in narrative and epistolary formats. As Laymon notes in one of the essays in the book, he purchased the collection back from his initial publisher in the interest of revising it. He did the same with another book that he released in 2013—his first and only novel, Long Division. Laymon released the second edition of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America in 2020.

Laymon is best known for his memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, published to great acclaim in 2018. Heavy won Laymon the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. Heavy also was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times.

Laymon is the recipient of a 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. He is at work on several new projects, including a long poem, a horror comedy, a children’s book, and the film Heavy: An American Memoir. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing.

Please note that this study guide both quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Summary

In this range of autobiographical and biographical essays and epistolary narratives, Kiese Laymon attempts to depict what it has meant for him to be a Black man from Mississippi who, like many Black Mississippians, came from a family with few financial means but innumerable ways to love and create. He starts off the collection with a chronicle of life during COVID-19 and the particular risks that the virus poses to Laymon and his elderly grandmother. This broader vision of a nation in crisis then narrows to that of Mississippi, which Laymon presents as a microcosm of the nation—a place that wants to belong to the future, while it refuses to reckon with its deeply entrenched and historicized racism. That racism is evident in his grandmother’s perpetually subservient role at a chicken factory; Mississippi’s fixation on its racist symbols; Laymon’s grandmother’s and mother’s fears about his personal safety as a Black man; countless preventable deaths of young Black men; and his illustrations of “the worst kind of white folks,” who are epitomized by a character named Trimp and racist police officers.

Despite these travails—including the death of an uncle, which inspired the collection—there are glimmers of hope. Laymon has dialogues with Black men on self-care. He writes about a young basketball player who has made mistakes but is determined to find happiness according to his own standards. Laymon also writes affectionately and powerfully about Southern hip-hop, particularly the Atlanta duo OutKast.

While the essay collection is honest and graphic about the pain that Black Americans endure, and that which they sometimes inflict on each other, Laymon does not wallow. Instead, he emphasizes how some Black people, particularly the women in his family, find ways to navigate through their pain. Their example is key to Laymon’s writing, which he also describes as a method of going under and above the dangers that run through his existence.