In terms of style, it recalls Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which mixes observation and outrage with grief. She exposes the disdain and discrimination they regularly face. The memoir also operates as a kind of manifesto in which Gay declares the obese a marginalized people. “Hunger is about desire, yearning, nourishment and the lack thereof,” she says. Hunger demonstrates how Gay’s weight exacerbated her innate loneliness and social awkwardness, how it intensified her deep desire to belong. Paradoxically, the flesh she accumulated for protection made her a prisoner of her body. At six foot three, she has at times approached 600 pounds. In Hunger, Gay probes the connection between her sexual trauma and her weight. And we are not seeing progress in terms of the rate. “But we are not seeing a lot of progress in terms of the justice system. “We are having more conversations about rape,” Gay says on the phone from California, where she lives part of the time.
For Gay, it’s about acknowledging the pervasiveness of sexual violence and its devastating impact on women. Female characters in Difficult Women accept physical cruelty as a relationship norm. In her novel An Untamed State, kidnappers grab a woman outside her father’s Haitian estate and subject her to weeks of depravity. Still, Gay has made sexual violence her primary preoccupation as a writer.
“Roxane Gay has the range,” Jones, BuzzFeed’s executive editor of culture, has said. “That’s a real and true legacy.” Her varied and prolific output is also remarkable. A brilliant editor, she has influenced scores of up-and-coming talents, including Saeed Jones and Ashley Ford. “An entire generation of writers will likely have Roxane to thank…” Ford says. Her essays, which appear in places like The New York Times, Salon and The Guardian, dissect popular culture, race, feminism and gender-occasionally all at once. Through Tumblr and especially Twitter, she maintains an active Internet presence. Today, Gay is a literary rock star with a passionate international following. “I just thought, ‘I am going to start to eat and I am going to get fat and I am going to be able to protect myself because boys don’t like fat girls.’ ” It’s a subject she explores deeply in her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. “I knew exactly what I was doing,” says Gay, who teaches English at Purdue University in Indiana and has also written a novel and two short-story collections.
Instead, she began to stuff herself with food. She told no one of the brutal attack-not even her doting Haitian parents. When Gay was 12 years old, she was led into the woods by her boyfriend, then raped by him and a dozen of his friends. (Jay Grabiec)Įmbedded in a dark corner of the collective psyche is writer Roxane Gay’s horrific account of sexual assault, detailed in her essay “What We Hunger For.” The piece is included in Gay’s bestselling Bad Feminist (2014), which turned the popular critic into a cultural icon. Author Roxane Gay in Coleman hall on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois on January 31, 2014.