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A review by maises
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon
4.5
“We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.”
I think How to Slowly Kill Yourself And Others in America is about making your mark and being seen in a world that is acclimated to ensuring those marks are washed off concrete. It’s a love letter to teachers. Each one of them in the classroom and out of it. There is a level of responsibility inherent in being a person living in society with other people, not necessarily accountability, but of knowing. Accepting. To be seen and heard is all that people ask, and these are the things that make a drastic difference in someone’s life: real support changes people. As Laymon says in his epilogue, “I have failed and I have maimed myself and others close to me. But I believe in transformation, and for the first time in my life, I really get how transformation is impossible without honest acceptance of who you are, whence you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow. Baldwin wrote years ago that the only real change is a moral change.”
We are all dying, but we are all living. The key is to live with as much dignity as you can and never ever bring other people down because you've given up on life. Your work is finished but your worth is still being revealed. Your life was not in vain, Jimmy. You made a difference.
Laymon’s writing is intimate. He is honest in being “bad at being human,” and in doing so layers his personal history of being a Black man navigating white American academia and lifestyle, of Black men kinship in the backdrop of early 2010s American political stirrings, of being a nephew, a grandson, and a son. All the essays had gravitas and impact and a touch of something private, written just for Laymon himself, that made me genuinely shed tears from how bare it felt. We Will Never Ever Know showcased this, repeated again in the letters seen in Echo: Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai and Marlon. I thought even Reasonable Doubt and the Lost Presidential Debate of 2012 (still on the pulse when reading in 2025) displayed Laymon’s personal dealings with his involvement and place in the greater picture at large—something all Americans eventually come to terms with and grieve when living in America.
In his introduction, Laymon noted he wanted to layer these essays like tracks in an album, and it resonated in a call and response of these themes interspersed between the pieces, beautiful and memorable in their execution. I blasted through this in a day, in the middle of a growing American sociopolitical cyst that continues to kill myself and people in America. This book held my hand, put in Laymon’s terms, whether or not I deserved it.
In his introduction, Laymon noted he wanted to layer these essays like tracks in an album, and it resonated in a call and response of these themes interspersed between the pieces, beautiful and memorable in their execution. I blasted through this in a day, in the middle of a growing American sociopolitical cyst that continues to kill myself and people in America. This book held my hand, put in Laymon’s terms, whether or not I deserved it.
Indeed, my living is your living, is your father's living, is my father's living, is my mother's living, is the stranger's living, and it is the revolution.