“I’m going to speak for Kiese: If either of us ever did one thing at a time, we might die,” says Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon, the professor and acclaimed author of Heavy: An American Memoir and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, seconds the sentiment. “That’s one of the things that connects us for sure, is to multitask.”
“I don’t know that I’m capable of not multitasking,” Philyaw says.
The pair’s newest undertaking is Reckon True Stories, a podcast that homes in on consequential nonfiction (contemporary or otherwise) and the writers behind the work. Philyaw and Laymon had let the idea percolate since 2019, shortly after they first met. “Folks in publishing will tell you that—a big misconception—to be a writer, there are all these fill-in-the-blanks: You need to be in New York or that that’s where the literary center of the world is,” Philyaw, whose short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is set to be adapted for HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing, says. “And as two Southerners, we know that that’s a lie.” The show is as much an exercise in rigorous literary analysis and discussion as it is the indulgence of what the hosts describe as selfishness. Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is due in 2025.
“For this first season, I think we just wanted to look across at people who we talk to normally and ask some questions we never got to ask them,” Laymon says. “Being able to talk to Deesha with the depth that we do and the love that we do with these folk, it just really helped me selfishly kind of get out of my way and get back to loving people in person. But I had to use these conversations to rev me up.”
Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Samantha Irby are among the folks slated to sit across from the duo in conversations which challenge assumptions and stereotypes of writers—key among them being that this cohort is only ever in competition with one another. But Reckon True Stories doesn’t in fact aim to remake the wheel. “I sound like I’m trying to sell you that we’re doing something new or fresh, and you know what?” Laymon says, “It might not be, but it is enjoyable and it kept me going for the last few six months or so. And I’m super, super thankful that we could do it. And I hope it vibes with people, but I appreciate the time and space that we got to move and shake with folks that we love, even if it doesn’t.”
Vanity Fair: Is there a particular moment that stuck with you or a certain piece of writing you discussed on the show that felt particularly revelatory?
Kiese Laymon: There’s an episode we’re talking about family and writing about family, ins and outs. And one of the pieces that I read of Deesha’s, she’s talking about her relationship with her father and being at Yale and an experience that happened with a car that got repo’d. And when I read it, because of my experiences with repossession and men and uncles and father types, I laughed. Then Deesha talked more about what happened and what it actually meant for her to have a car at Yale that got repo’d because her father wasn’t paying it.
And that show was all about love. I think about that shit every day, Deesha. I think about it every day, about how you had to spin that piece a zillion times to get it down to that. I can’t run away from that. We had some incredible moments with a lot of different people on, but that’s the one I keep coming back to.
Deesha Philyaw: That’s the episode for me too.
So much of my relationship with my father, for me, was shrouded in secrecy and shame. I hadn’t done anything. I was ashamed of the things that he did, I was ashamed of the things he failed to do, and I carried that. And so to talk about it publicly was wild. And if I was going to talk to anybody about it publicly, it was going to be Kiese, because Heavy was like, wait, he’s writing about his family, he’s telling the truth about his family, but the first line is, “I wanted to tell a lie.” And I understood that urge to tell the lie because of the shame.