“I wanted to wrest control of that narrative back from the people who have seized it.” “I really just wanted to talk about what obesity - no, I hate that word - what fat looks like, beyond what people generally see, where you’re talking about someone who is 60 or 100 pounds overweight,” Gay says.
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Although she turns a critical eye inward, she has much to say about a culture that glorifies TV shows such as “The Biggest Loser” and “My 600-lb Life” but makes little effort to accommodate larger people or support their physical and mental health. I am the fattest person.īut she also chronicles her perseverance, her formative relationships, and her ongoing quest for healing and peace. (How sturdy is a chair? How high the step onto a stage?) She conveys the relentless anxieties that fuel a “constant, destructive refrain”: I am the fattest person in this shopping mall. There is the exhaustion of constant scrutiny, of unavoidable logistical challenges. Over “Hunger’s” 88 short chapters, she explores the loneliness and pain of her body’s constraints. it’s not something I took any pleasure in.”
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“And so to expose myself and this history of my body. “When you’re fat, your body is not a secret, but you still hold on to secrets you pretend, of course, that people don’t see you the way you know they see you,” Gay says. In January, she pulled a forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster in protest, after the publishing house signed far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.īut this was different. Gay, now on faculty at Purdue University, is the kind of writer who is usually game to jump into a Twitter battle or slap down a troll. (Thos Robinson/Getty Images for the New Yorker) Roxane Gay, center, on a panel at the New Yorker festival in 2015, with Jill Lepore and Geraldo Cadava. She wrote about the dark pull the saccharine “Sweet Valley High” books had over her childhood she examined the troublesome ways that rape is represented in news coverage she condemned the fixation on Trayvon Martin’s hoodie as a way to shift the blame for his murder. Starting as a creative writing professor at Eastern Illinois University, she made her name with trenchant essays for online outlets such as Salon and the Rumpus. It was a surprising confession from a writer who has never shied from personal disclosure or controversy. In April 2016, Gay explained to her 200,000 Twitter followers: “There is no mystery beyond I still haven’t turned it in because the book is scary.” She procrastinated, and the book, originally scheduled for publication last year, was delayed. But the prospect of revealing herself so completely proved terrifying.
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Writing is usually a source of joy for her she assumed the words would flow easily. Which made it the most painful story to tell, Gay says. But of all her work so far, “Hunger” is certainly the most vulnerable. Her most recent collection of short stories, “Difficult Women,” is filled with quirky, surrealist tales of sisterhood, loss and toxic relationships. Gay has long focused her work on matters such as sexuality, gender, race, body image, violence. “They knew nothing of my determination to keep making my body into what I needed it to be - a safe harbor rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me,” Gay writes. Food became a vital source of comfort her doting parents, both Haitian immigrants, were alarmed as their quiet daughter gained more and more weight. “Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.”įor years, she told no one. “They did things I’ve never been able to talk about, and will never be able to talk about,” she writes. The resulting book turned into a portrait of resilience in the aftermath of trauma: When Gay was 12, a boy she adored lured her to a cabin in the woods near her Nebraska home, and he and a group of his friends raped her. “And then I started to think, ‘Well, what would it be like to write a memoir of my body?’” “I’d wanted to write about fat for a while, and I didn’t quite know how,” she says. “I wished I could write that book,” says Gay, 42, a once-obscure academic and fiction writer whose tart takes on social issues and pop-culture built a loyal online audience and helped launch a best-selling 2014 collection of essays, “ Bad Feminist.” There’s no tidy resolution here, no willowy woman on the book jacket holding the waistband of her old pants an arm’s reach from her new body.
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“ Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body” is no weight-loss memoir, she is quick to explain. Instead, it’s a searing account of the essayist’s lifelong struggle with her weight, which once topped 500 pounds. “The story of my body is not a story of triumph,” Gay writes in the opening pages. Roxane Gay begins her new book - the hardest she’s ever had to write - by describing what it isn’t. Roxane Gay set out wanting to write about fat, but she “started to think, ‘Well, what would it be like to write a memoir of my body?’ ” (Jay Grabiec)