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Surprisingly, Hunger had an impact not only on fat people but on the relationship many of us have with our own bodies. "For some people, writing about trauma well means that it helps them work through something." Christopher and several of his friends raped me in the woods, in an abandoned hunting cabin, where no one but those boys could hear my screams," she wrote in Hunger. His name wasn't really Christopher, but I don't have to tell you that. In my history of violence, there was a boy. Sometimes I feel as if the past could kill me. When Roxane published Hunger: Memories of (My) Body, the book she says she had the hardest time writing, she was addressing how traumas like the gang rape she suffered at age 12 run through people's bodies and also how normalized fatphobia is in our society. But is that going to be writing trauma well for an audience?" she asks. "For some people, writing about trauma well means that it helps them work through something.
#INTERVIEW ROXANE GAY HUNGER GUARDIAN HOW TO#
"We are walking wounds, but I'm not sure any of us know very well how to talk about it," says Gay. In a wonderful interview with Monica Lewinsky for Vanity Fair, Gay opens up generously and reflects on her traumas and writing. It is trauma literature - not about getting rid of a wound (there are no formulas), but about using the writing craft to connect with others and expose what the system tries to sweep under the rug.Īfter teaching a workshop at Yale on how to write about trauma, Gay has just published Writing Into The Wound, published on Scribd, and is now also leading a 20-session course on writing for social change. Roxane Gay wrote about the gang rape she suffered when she was 12 years old and how the wound leaves scars, how those scars, in turn, can become the engine of change through writing.īut it is not therapeutic writing, no. A radical act, yes, through which she has confronted us with our vision of feminisms, with fatphobia and the social control of the body, with the multiple traumas that pierce us. And she has done so on many occasions, displaying a talent that she masters with sensitivity, empathy, and large doses of truth. The writer Roxane Gay does not like to be called a brave person for exposing her own personal experiences and struggles and turning them into a book. There are also inherited traumas - historical, ancestral, familial - and yet, except for death, there is nothing more taboo in this society than the expression of one's pain and wounds. Everyone has wounds, sometimes so deep that they come back again and again even if you think they are healed. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.Trauma is always both personal and social. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.'New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. 'I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.