She has written with exacting honesty about nearly everything I could ask her about. There's something about the bareness, the unabashed need that oozes out of her words (because that's how we treat need: as if it's seeping and possibly infectious) that makes me feel exposed just reading them, like she's giving up our secrets, us humans with our sadness and weird toes and fear of being alone. In every sentence, she's there: exposed, doubtful, present.Īnd Roxane Gay makes me nervous. Gay never obscures her authorial self, never pretends that her writings were birthed immaculately, handed down whole from the mount whence cultural judgments are dispensed. Gay - novelist, essayist and relentless documenter of her own life - proclaims her I-ness everywhere she goes: On her blog, she describes what she ate for dinner, what made her mad on an airplane, what she's afraid of, what she's ashamed of, what makes her lonely.Įverything is about her - and that's how it should be. 'I do not care for epigraphs.' 'I was not impressed.'
Roxane Gay's new collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is littered with defiant, regal I's. Her essay collection Bad Feminist will be released later this year. Roxane Gay's new novel is An Untamed State.
