Kiese Laymon and Deesha Philyaw Go Deep Into the Writer’s Mind With ‘Reckon True Stories’

“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.

I didn’t know Kiese when I was reading Heavy. I was like, here’s this guy who feels like I feel and he’s doing this thing anyway, and I was just in awe of that. And so being able to talk about that with Kiese was really a transformative moment for me.

A lot of this podcast is doing a beautiful thing of having the essays there, the writing there, but then also the element of intimate detail. I’m wondering, when it came to this project was there ever any discussion about the intimate versus the theory, the writing?

Philyaw: We do talk about that with each other and with our guests, and everybody is coming at it from a different perspective with different boundaries and different experiences, different fears, different regrets. And I’m hoping that for people listening, it not only gives people permission to write about those things that maybe their family or someone else is telling them they can’t, but also permission to not write about it, because that’s as valid as anything. I think our culture says that everything is supposed to be revealed. And yes, and I’m certainly the biggest proponent of “our secrets can kill us”—they really can—but there’s some nuance there as well.

Laymon: What I love about the question is that it makes you think about the performance of art. Sometimes that question, we all get at different degrees, assumes the way we package this conversation and give it to the world, our intent with each other, they’re going to get it that way. And I think the wonder of Black art is that they never get what the fuck we intend. They can think they do but they don’t. And we are not writing for them to, we’re not. A fact is we’re not synthesizing or translating on this show. There’s a market to fetishize everything we talk about on this thing, so the question is, are we playing in that market or not? I don’t know. I think we’re not, because I forgot that motherfuckers are going to be listening to this shit, for real. I forgot. If you are sincerely talking curiously and honestly and imaginatively to anyone Black on this planet, corporate America might buy that shit, but you don’t need to worry that they going to fucking understand it, because they’re not, which is at once one of the worst things in the world, and absolutely one of the most glorious things to me about being a Black motherfucker.

Philyaw: I tend to believe that when we are in a Vanity Fair or in Essence or any of these spaces, telling these stories, truly, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, but telling the truth, in particular telling the old stories, writing about Southern folks, writing about Southern Black folks, writing about our grandmothers who worked in chicken factories and who drove manual elevators, I think there’s a delight, not because it’s Vanity Fair, but because they lived for decades in a world that said that their stories didn’t matter and that their lives didn’t matter. And so our work, again, calls out the lie of that.

With a podcast I find you have to be self-indulgent and selfish about the topic or concept because then you’re inviting folks into your world.

Laymon: There’s this moment when we’re talking to Sam Irby, and Deesha and Sam started talking about lipstick. And I learned so much in that 45-minute segment. We talked to Sam Irby about the Sam Irby stuff, but I think that lipstick is Sam Irby stuff. And though people might not think weed talk is an Alexander Chee thing, I actually think that is too.

Philyaw: It’s a quiet form of resistance the way that we’re doing it in terms of who our guests are, not just this season, but as Kiese said, future seasons, inviting folks who may be newer, as well as elders. Because everything that we’re doing is counter to the industry’s lies, that this sort of camaraderie isn’t real. It doesn’t exist or it doesn’t benefit us that we are supposed to, especially as writers of color, that we’re supposed to see each other as competition because there can only be one.

Even the lipstick, seemingly something frivolous—Samantha Irby and I have never met in public, in person, it still blows my mind, but we did an event when my book came out and she was kind enough to talk to me about Church Ladies, and we hadn’t gone live yet. And if you know Sam, you know that she is a makeup girl and she always has on a stunning, usually red lip, and I’m admiring it. Oh my gosh, she’s gorgeous. And she’s like, I’ll send you some. And she sends me three tubes of this Tom Ford lipstick. I didn’t know lipstick could cost that much money, because I had never had designer lipstick. It was such a simple gesture, but it meant the absolute world to me that she would do that. So every time I put on that lipstick, I think about Sam Irby. And then I can take it further and think about the community of writers that I’m a part of, that I love them and they love me, and we are actively resisting being in competition with one another.

Laymon: I just think the stories that we tell each other are kind of public, so there’s going to be sort of a performative element to it. But even when we were talking to Roxane, I was talking about the first time we met in the basement of some hotel in New Orleans at some late event, and I walked up to Roxane Gay, never seen her in person before, she just interviewed me for The Nation for something, and I was like, “Oh, what’s up?” And the first thing Roxane said to me was, “I know I look much more beautiful in person than in pictures, don’t I?” and I was like, “You do.” So we’re talking about that on the podcast, in addition to talking about all the other wonderful shit these people do.

And looking to the future of the show, how do you hope this will develop?

Laymon: We needed some sort of stability for our first season. Second season, I think we’re going to be much more interested in asking a lot of younger essayists, but also asking essayists who we don’t know and possibly just really don’t agree with. But I think we needed to get our feet on the ground first before we did that.

Philyaw: The list is massive, and I’m looking at it and I’m like, this is seven seasons right here. Sometimes the essay comes first, we don’t know the person. So these are people who we suspect, even if we don’t know them very well, that it’s not going to be pulling teeth to get them to talk and just really allow us to connect with them. Even if as Kiese said, we are not necessarily in agreement with everything that they write, but they’re raising interesting questions.

Laymon: I got a lightweight mercenary in me. I want to have a season where I invite folk who I just want to go at, but I feel like we might not be there until season three. I also have a thing where I don’t like to diss people for money, so I don’t know if we’re going to do that. But there’s some essayists out there I really do want to get on. But I think if we start there, it’s a different show, I mean I think the tone changes. I think first chapters matter.

Philyaw: Roxane, for as long as I think she’s been on social media, she’s always talked about having a nemesis, right? And on the show, we tried to get her to tell us—she gave us a hint, I still don’t know who it is. But what if we say during one season we’re going to invite our nemesis? We’re not going to tell you who they are because we’re both from the South and we know how to be what they call “nice nasty.” So you will never know who the nemesis is, because we’re going to be hospitable.

Laymon: The nemesis season, I’m down for that.

This interview has been lightly edited for length.