I never thought I would write one memoir, so I can’t say I’m never gonna write another, but I have no plans to. As long as my parents are around that will not become part of another memoir. Could that be the kernel for another memoir? That revelation felt connected to the chapter about quitting Yale to move to Arizona, which alluded to some complicated sexual encounters. I wasn’t thinking about the reader when I wrote that. I actually haven’t heard anything about that specific part. What kind of responses have you had to that section? There is some difficult material in the book regarding the effect the attack had on your sex life, particularly when you write that you have to think about your attacker if you want to experience pleasure during sex. And recognising that, in many ways, I was holding on to the weight for the wrong reasons and the only one that was really hurting was myself. I mostly saw how unkind I had been to myself when my body has actually gotten me through quite a lot in life. I was able to make some realisations about myself that previously I hadn’t made and it really forced me to confront my relationship not only with my body, but with food. It started as a process of writing what I know to be true and it became a process of revelation. I think writing always gives us control over the things that we can’t actually control in our lives, so taking control of the narrative of my body as a public space was absolutely helpful in terms of thinking about my relationship to my body.ĭid you encounter personal revelations as you were writing? She lives between Indiana and LA.įrom your early forays on to internet messageboards to writing this book, it seems as though language was a key part of processing the trauma of your childhood rape.
She is also the author of Marvel’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda and will publish her first YA work, The Year I Learned Everything, later this year. It deals with Gay’s rape at the age of 12 and the lifelong consequences of her decision to make her body as big as possible as a form of self-protection.
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She has published a novel, An Untamed State, two short story collections, Ayiti and Difficult Women, the New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist (which Time magazine described as “a manual on how to be human”), and a memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Corsair, £8.99), released in paperback on 7 June. B orn in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1974, Roxane Gay is an author, essayist, New York Times opinion writer and associate professor of English at Indiana’s Purdue University.