She published her first piece of memoir in 2007 and spent a good decade before that experiencing the inner-chest thud of rejection. This record might suggest that Gay is an overnight success, but she isn’t. In the last five years, she has written an acclaimed novel, An Untamed State (2014), a NYT bestselling collection of essays, B_ad Feminist_ (for an introduction to Gay’s brilliance and wit, watch this Ted Talk excerpt), two short story collections, Ayiti (2011) and Difficult Women (2016), and a Marvel comic, World of Wakanda (2016).
This method clearly works, because there are few writers today who are as prolific, passionate, and galvanizing as Gay.
“I tell myself no one’s going to read it, so I put anything I want in it.” “The things that scare me most,” Gay said, “tend to be the things that are the most intellectually satisfying.” Yet, how does one take the risk of working with intimidating material and then sharing it with the world? “I do what I always do when I write,” Gay said. As a creative writing teacher, I was especially excited when Gay talked about how she approaches writing.Įarly on in the interview, Gay discussed one of the most important decisions a writer must make: what material to engage with.
Last month I saw Roxane Gay in an on-stage interview in Toronto, where she was discussing her newest book Hunger, a powerful memoir about trauma and living in an “unruly body.” Gay was fascinating, moving, smart, and funny (as her work always is). Photo: Gay in Montreal, 2015, by Eva Blue