Good, God.jpg
Good, God.jpg

Good, God: A Creation Story by Kiese Laymon

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Hardcover:

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.

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.

  • Publisher: Scribner

    Title: Good, God: A Creation Story

    Author: Kiese Laymon

    On Sale Date: April 6, 2027

    ISBN 13: 9781982172138

    ISBN 10: 1982172134

    Format: Hardcover

    Retail Price: $29.00

    BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / African American & Black; Personal Memoirs

    Page Count: 256 pages

    Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.67 x 8.38 in

    Weight: 15.3 oz

  • Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University, based in Jackson, Mississippi. His memoir Heavy won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and was named among the fifty best memoirs of the past half-century by The New York Times. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

  • Advance praise is calling it singular, masterful, and honest:

    • "Laymon signifies and saves with a singular voice, a singular vision." — Jesmyn Ward

    • "Good, God is a masterwork and Kiese Laymon is a master teacher." — Robert Jones, Jr.

    • "Laymon further proves he is the most honest writer of his generation." — Jason Reynolds

    • "Good, God is a testament to vulnerability and honesty." — Deesha Philyaw

This book is for you if

  • You read Heavy and want to spend more time in Kiese Laymon’s sentences.

  • You’re drawn to memoir that holds mortality and fatherhood in the same hand, without sentimentality.

  • You want to understand a life shaped by generations of women who came before it.

  • You appreciate writers who examine their own bodies and health as honestly as their pasts.

  • You trust a MacArthur Fellow to make the personal feel exact rather than confessional.

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