Kiese Laymon grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. That was where he began to seek to create an honest account of living in the US, a country striving to declare itself multi-cultural, post-racial and mostly innocent.Drawing on his own personal experiences, these essays are Laymon's attempt to deal with many issues occupying America today, from race, identity and writing to music, celebrity and violence. Through letters between his own disparate family members, pleas to performers, recollections of his own failures, analysis of the growing culture of fear in the media and detailed accounts of his clashes with the US education system, Laymon gets closer not only to the truth behind himself, but to the promises behind the promised land.