Good, God

A powerful, benedictive new memoir from a master of the form, Good, God: A Creation Story probes the comic, and often ghoulish, experience of creating children, creating good friendship, creating good art, and creating good Gods while waiting to die in America

When Kiese Laymon’s best friend invites him to help her create a child in the age of Trump, Laymon must reckon with how a romanticization of Mississippi, his role as a writer, and his grandmother, have telegraphed the kind of friend, father, and artist he can be. Why doesn’t he want to be a father in this nation? Why is he insistent that Mississippi is the only place he would consider helping a child be born? What if his grandmother, his reason for living and making art, dies before a child can be born?

While probing the relationships with three generations of women in his life, Laymon continues his courageous, wide-open approach to memoir with Good, God—an attempt to lay bare the knot of intimacy and brutality that lies at the heart of all confession: whether it be between parent and child, partner and partner, reader and writer, comedy and tragedy, the north and the deep south.

Spanning fifty years, from his childhood to the present, delivered through several powerful episodes that fold into one another—his childhood memories of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance undoes his grandmother; a kind Northern white family who comes to stay with his grandmother on the presumption that they know her from his books; the process of trying to create a child with his best friend as he is treated for cancer—Good, God invites us into experiences we cannot shed, where good, God, grandmothers, prayer, and every conception of love itself, must be reconsidered, recast and recreated holy.