I was actually very resistant to it for a long time. I never really planned on writing memoir. Why was it scary to write this particular memoir about your life?

You’ve described the writing process for Hunger as very scary or difficult. It was originally anticipated last year and Difficult Women came out instead earlier this year.

Here, Gay discusses the difficulty of in finally writing Hunger, why her new memoir is not a story of triumph, making herself vulnerable to the public and why she doesn’t believe her literary honesty makes her brave. Gay says she didn’t begin to truly confront her past until she was in her thirties. It is also, more importantly, a book about the body, specifically Gay’s, which she describes as, “wildly undisciplined,” and about the ways in which she navigated, processed and responded to trauma.īut gaining weight and developing a difficult relationship to food never truly addressed the underlying trauma. It is a book about the human process, which is messy and multifaceted, rather than clean and simple. With all that going on, Gay recently released Hunger, an unconventional memoir that rejects the common narrative of triumph to instead tell a story without a straightforward ending. This is her fourth book in three years, and that doesn’t count the series she writes for Marvel or any of the other projects she’s juggling, including her teaching career at Purdue University as Associate Professor of English. Her work ethic is also something to behold. Through her fiction, articles, tweets, TED Talk and more, she has helped lead discussion we need to be having in 2017 on everything from race, pop culture, police violence against people of color, gender, sexual assault and more. Since the release of her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist, Gay has gone on to become one of the leading voices in the American conversation. “But that is what told me this is what I should be writing.” I just didn’t want to do it,” Roxane Gay tells Rolling Stone. “Writing about the body is a very vulnerable thing.

Hunger memoir