In Hunger, she singles out the twisted way the culture frames obesity. It is a deeply honest witness, often heartbreaking, and always breathtaking.Īs a cultural critic, Gay is a master of the call-out, mincing no words when taking on misogyny or racism. In a collection of staccato chapters, she shares how she forged the shield. Pound by pound, she built a soft, thick, mass of armor to protect the sweet bits of her soul that were left. Storytelling is storytelling at the end of the day.Nolead ends For nearly 30 years, Roxane Gay used food to cope with an act of violence done to her before she was out of puberty, before her body had a chance to blossom gently and unbruised.Īs she writes in Hunger, turning her 6-foot-3 frame into a fortress by "eating and eating and eating" was a response to gang rape. “Luckily my audience has been willing to follow where I go because it’s a joy to try different things. “I love writing and I hate constraint and early on in my career I decided I was never going to be pigeon-holed,” she says.
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Next year alone will see the publication of a Young Adult novel, The Year I Learned Everything, a book of writing advice, How to be Heard, and a collection of essays about TV. She is sick too of “people who expect black women to be the mules of social justice, being everything to everyone and knowing everything about all social justice movements all of the time…the people who expect that are the people who are going to drive me off Twitter because they’re so infuriating and so terrible.”īesides good as she is at the Twitter clapback Gay is surely too busy writing to deal with the many small stupidities of life online.
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I’m definitely interested in engaging more with that.” For once I have a great real life, which helps. “More and more I find myself taking breaks for days and even a week at a time and it’s good stepping away. She recently moved to Los Angeles and has taken a step back from the social media whirl. That said her life is no longer as isolated as it was in her twenties when the Internet “allowed me to pretend I was anyone else…a saving grace when I was at my most mentally fragile and losing my sense of self”. Because how do you make it through this world without some sort of self-loathing given how demonised and degraded women are and how often. Whenever people say they don’t have any kind of self-loathing I always want to say really? Teach me. She is pleased that Hunger’s success “did change some hearts and minds about how we think about unwieldy bodies, how we treat fat people and how we accommodate different kinds of bodies in different kinds of spaces” but adds that “there’s a good deal of work to be done. “They love the way we love, they hurt the way we hurt and unfortunately because they’ve not been exposed to a great deal of diversity they’re very protective of what they have and very entitled about what they don’t. I’ve lived there for 80 per cent of my life. Everyone working in service here from the hotel front desk to the housekeeping and waiters is an immigrant so what the hell is the plan?” – to the reality of life in the ‘flyover states’: “I was born and raised among these people.
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Warm, charismatic and considered, her answers are as precise as her prose, and as wide-ranging taking in everything from Brexit – “If it actually happens the UK will collapse. Meeting her in person it’s easy to see why. At the end the rapt audience gave Gay a standing ovation. A packed event earlier this week in London’s Southbank Centre managed to be both electric in its anticipation and intensely personal in delivery.
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Such clear-eyed honesty has won her fans from all ages and backgrounds.