They often fail to provide a chair that will not collapse under her weight or squeeze her painfully. She complains bitterly that event organizers do not pre-plan to be sure that she can get up stairs and doesn’t have to stand too long.
The man’s question is reasonable, not personal. It was absurd to imagine I could not handle the exit-row responsibilities.” As Gay has taken pains to inform the reader, she has difficulty maneuvering, and it would take some doing to send her hurtling down an inflatable exit ramp if she stayed to assist others, her bulk would hinder the easy passage of other passengers to the ramp. She writes, “I was fat, but I was, and still am, tall and strong. She tamps down her rage when a fellow airplane passenger questions whether she will be able to handle the duties required of people sitting in the exit row. She admits that she is essentially disabled in certain ways, though she functions at an unusually high level in many areas where others struggle. Diets don’t work because she panics when the fortress thins out.
She folds in on herself to become invisible. People make comments or say insensitive things about her weight. She sometimes has trouble getting through doors. Gay cannot fit into hospital gowns, clothes found in most stores, feminine clothes she cannot stand for long, climb stairs, or walk long distances. I personally know at least one person who has created such a outsize fortress, and then there’s Oprah, who was also molested as a child.Įach episodic chapter, written in unremarkable sentences without attention to a narrative arc, outlines a separate area of suffering. Gay’s case protective reaction has been to eat herself into an impermeable, outsize fortress, and once you do that, it is hard to go back to the way you were before. Adults may deal with the death of a parent, neglect, foster care, illness or disability, war, forced emigration, poverty, beatings, but perhaps molestation is uniquely harmful. Millions of people know how this works because violation of children is so common. The protective mechanisms - obsessive physical and emotional privacy, a sharp reaction when touched, flashbacks - are not always obvious, and Gay has made us more sensitive to them. Her story interested me because people I know have been similarly transformed by callous manipulation of their bodies when they were children.
Prior to the presentation, Gay met with BHCC faculty to discuss how her works have been integrated into the College’s curriculum, shared her views on trigger warnings in an educational institution with members of the recently initiated BHCC Faculty and Staff Book Club and visited students studying African American Women and Literature.Roxane Gay was transformed in the worst possible way by a gang rape when she was twelve. “If I think too much about audience, then I’m not going to have the courage to say the kinds of things that I most need to say, and I’m not going to be as honest as I need to be on the page.” “When I write, especially when I write something personal, I tell myself that no one is going to read my work,” said Gay when asked how she’s able to balance truth in storytelling with personal humility. At Thursday’s event, she read excerpts of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, a book that explores what it means to be overweight in a world where body size and image is a focal point, and the struggle of overcoming trauma.įrom Hunger, Gay shared with the audience her distaste of exercise, her love for Ina Garten and The Barefoot Contessa and the joy that comes from enjoying the Haitian cuisine of her childhood, before opening the discussion to student questions. Gay’s work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds barred exploration of feminism and social criticism.
She recently became the first black woman to write for Marvel, penning a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda.
Named “America’s brightest new essayist” by The Guardian, Gay is the author of New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Difficult Women.