Interview roxane gay hunger guardian
Roxane Gay: The stories in this collection are in one way or another all about public womanhood, and how women have to deal with private sorrows and pains in a very public world. I try.Ī Feel-Good Interview with John Waters about “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance”Īmy Brady: In your previous work, Bad Feminist, you write about the tremendous pressure of being a successful woman in the public eye, a condition of existence that you wonderfully describe as “the dangers of public womanhood.” In what ways does this new story collection extend, revise, reassert, or otherwise affect your experience of public womanhood, however you might define it? The older and hopefully more mature I’ve gotten, the more I try to recognize that binaries are not terribly useful in trying to create change, and so I try to hold a measure of empathy for people who I sort of instinctively want to dismiss. When I think about the “other side” of these issues, my gut reaction is that they are wrong and I am on the side of right. Roxane Gay: When I’m writing my nonfiction, in particular, I’m often tackling social issues and thinking about equality and representation. How does this kind of self-work translate to your writing? Literally.Īmy Brady: In an essay for The New York Times about Nate Parker and his controversial film, The Birth of a Nation, you wrote that as you “get older” you “try to have more empathy” for other people-even when you know there are limits to that empathy (as in Parker’s case).
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This story was simply a story about a girl who is followed, haunted by water and its weight. When I write, there is rarely some grand statement I am trying to make. Roxane Gay: When I wrote this story I was living in an apartment with a rotting ceiling, and I thought: “What if someone created rot just by existing?” It’s interesting that a lot of people read way more into this story. I won’t spoil its ending for our readers, but I will say that it left me feeling many things-namely, hope and sadness for the protagonist and frustrating recognition when it comes to the men in her life. Difficult Women felt like the perfect title to hold the spirit of these stories.Īmy Brady: One of my favorite stories in Difficult Women is “Water, All Its Weight,” which follows a woman who inadvertently creates rain wherever she goes. They face difficult situations and make difficult choices. The women in my stories are messy and complicated. Roxane Gay: As I considered the women in this collection, I realized they would be termed “difficult” because that’s a catch-all term for women who don’t shut up and look pretty.
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I love the title Difficult Women, especially in light of the fact that the collection’s female characters are only “difficult” from certain (usually male) perspectives. Fiction is my first love.Īmy Brady: Let’s talk about your most recent collection of stories. Roxane Gay: I identify primarily as a fiction writer though the work I am most well known for is nonfiction. Do you identify most as any one kind of writer? Somehow, amid her incredibly busy schedule, she found some time to speak with us about her new book, her resolution to be more empathetic in 2017, and what it’s like to write about trauma as a victim of trauma herself.Īmy Brady: You’ve written a novel, short stories, essays, and a memoir, among many other things. Difficult Womendrops today, and it’s wonderful. After two years since her last book published, she gives us a long anticipated collection of short stories. When not writing, Gay teaches at Purdue University, where she’s an associate professor of English, and lectures around the country on race, feminism, and pop culture. Gay’s writing encompasses so much-simultaneously direct, funny, whipsmart, sometimes painful, and always thought-provoking. Together, the books offer some of the best writing from any contemporary American writer.
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Both were released to critical fanfare and predictably poked the hornet’s nest of conservative Twitter.
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In 2014, Time Magazine wrote “let this be the year of Roxane Gay.” There are many reasons why that should have been the case, but, most importantly, Gay published two books that year: her debut novel, An Untamed State, and a provocatively titled essay collection, Bad Feminist.