Tag: Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist – Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist - Roxanne GayThis is a challenging set of essays published in 2014. Gay displays righteous anger toward issues like rape culture and sexual violence. Her writing is always provocative but also self-deprecating. Above all it is her honesty that is compelling. Comments on Sweet Valley High, The Hunger Games and her obsession with Law & Order (SVU) are delightful. She is very aware that her life (and opinions) is messy, full of contradictions and biases. It will be interesting to read follow-up essays in this era of #MeToo. Gay is an American cultural treasure.

Difficult Women – Roxane Gay

Difficult Women - Roxane GayThis is a book of previously published short stories. As a collective book, the story-telling becomes even more powerful. Gay’s writing is both compelling and disturbing. The situations she describes are amazingly diverse: raunchy and dangerous with some awesomely poor decision-making. There are situations of danger, physical and sexual abuse. So be warned: this is a book with impact.

Hunger – Roxane Gay

Hunger - Roxane GayPreviously, I used the words “brutally honest and uncomfortably candid” to describe Camilla Gibbs’s memoir This Is Happy, and the same descriptors can be applied emphatically to this memoir by Roxane Gay. Gay is subjected to a brutal sexual assault at age 12; she discusses being both a survivor and a victim. There are two dramatic aspects to the aftermath: her silence and her reaction to eating, to become fat and undesirable in order to be safe. Gay vividly describes living in a wildly undisciplined body as she becomes categorized as morbidly obese. The cruelty of public opinion of her appearance (i.e. fat shaming) is tragic. Her own analysis of her psychology is self-loathing. This is a deeply personal memoir that is often disturbing but occasionally comic as she describes how much she hates exercise. An amazing story.