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The first of these hinges on the horrifying rape visited on her as a 12-year-old by her boyfriend and several of his friends. Hunger comprises at least two stories: a partial but more or less linear telling of Gay’s life so far, and a more halting, spiralling description of her everyday experience as a fat woman. People asking those kinds of questions don’t deserve an answer, and yet here Gay has decided to give them one. No doubt Gay is thoroughly sick of being reduced to her body and of enduring constant inquiries, prejudices and criticism, and she has evidently worked hard to make space for herself to talk and write about other things.
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Simply leaving the house means navigating a physical and emotional obstacle course. Doctors not only patronise her but routinely refuse her basic care. It’s a totally different book, but it’s really interesting and she’s an amazing, fierce writer, and you just never know what’s going to happen.Shopping for clothes or food, visiting a restaurant or getting on a plane frequently involve a humiliating ordeal. Right now I’m reading Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. I just finished A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and I loved it, I thought it was amazing. So the novel really looks at the bond between her and her child and how she tries to get her child back. Early in their marriage he asks her to have a child for his sister via surrogacy and she agrees. The adult novel is called Nice Man, and it’s about a young woman who comes home as a kid and finds her parents dead in a murder-suicide, and she ends up going to college at 16 and meets a venture capitalist who says, “Marry me and all your problems will go away.” Even though she doesn’t love him she agrees. But I don’t mind that people call it YA, and I’m excited to write for a new audience. It’s based on a short story I wrote that people kept calling YA even though I didn’t think of it as YA-it’s just about a teenager.
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It’s their love story and how she learns how to be loved and imagine a life for herself beyond her small town. The summer before her senior year of high school she meets a boy who is the lifeguard in her town, and he’s unlike anyone she’s every dated, sort of ugly and nerdy. My young-adult novel is called The Year I Learned Everything, and it’s about a young woman who lives in a small town in Illinois and has a secret. Do you feel, through your writing and tweeting, that you can change the conversation? I feel feminism is still a misunderstood concept. But everyone else has been wonderful, and I’ve had really great conversations that have helped me improve my thinking on the topic. The people who really hate the book have no problem letting me know that. Some people have said I loved your book but I disagree with everything you said, and people have said they’ve just downright hated it. What sort of reactions have you gotten from writing about things like competition between genders and representations of women in pop culture?Ī lot of people have said that it’s helped them understand and find their place in feminism. I loved Bad Feminist and the concepts you explore in it. In anticipation of her Chicago Humanities Festival talk on Friday with “one of my favorite writers,” fellow Chicagoan Lindsay Hunter, Gay talked over the phone about becoming a feminist voice, her forthcoming book on obesity, and the fiction projects she’s juggling. The 41-year-old writer and Purdue University associate professor tackled rape in her 2014 novel An Untamed State, race and gender in the essay collection Bad Feminist that same year, and since being named a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times in March has weighed in on everything from Sandra Bland’s death at the hands of police to the bizarre reality-TV mating ritual of The Bachelorette. One of the most commanding, entertaining critics of contemporary culture, Roxane Gay is never one to shy away from tough topics.
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