Weight is the central image of Heavy, and it works in rich, complex ways. Laymon experiences his own weight as an expression of concealment and repression: thinness and fatness are to do with different kinds of hiding. Heaviness is also an image of complete personhood, the ability to hold conflicting and painful truths in one solid self.

When Laymon begins to become anorexic, his Uncle Jimmy looks askance at him: “My nephew went to grad school and now he turning into a white girl. You just love losing weight? That’s damn near the craziest shit I heard in thirty years, Kie” (166). Jimmy—and the world—imagine weight loss as both a white and a female matter; Laymon, in his drive to make himself small, uses a female-coded kind of self-hatred to manufacture a body more palatable to both the Black and the white world. Weight-loss is the disguise of acceptability, diminishing the self in an effort not to be offensive, not to take up space.

Laymon’s fatness, on the other hand, links to a different kind of hiding: a desire to shove down a pain that his family and his country alike won’t allow him to express. Laymon binges when he’s been hurt, and he often binges on foods that are themselves symbolically weighty, representing affection, silence, abasement, or denial (see the “Symbols” section for more on this).