Truths And Consequences

Fans of Essayist and Critic Roxane Gay May Believe She’s Already Bared All in Her Quest to Expose Our Hypocrisies. But a New Memoir About Her Weight May Be Her Most Feminist—and Revealing—act Yet.

- Marisa Meltzer

Roxane Gay is many things—critic, social media firebrand, English professor, self-described “love child” of Beyoncé and Ina Garten, bisexual Haitian-American PhD, and romance-novel fan. She is both “painfully shy” and utterly without shame when it comes to exposing the most raw parts of her psyche. But one thing she is not: coy. So, in her new book, Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body (HarperCollins), she strips away all the niceties to reveal her most painful truth, “This is the reality of living in my body; I am trapped in a cage.”

When we meet at her apartment in Lafayette, Indiana, where she has been a professor at Purdue University for three years, Gay looms large. At 6’3”, the 42-year-old has a commanding, vaguely regal presence.

“Whenever I thought about women doing books about bodies and weight, it was always women who had undergone a fitness journey or a weight loss journey,” Gay says, “and they’re at the end of it, standing on the cover in their fat pants, ‘Look at me—I’m so thin, I’ve learnt so much.’” Hunger, on the other hand, isn’t oversimplified or prescriptive. It is visceral and confrontationally honest, and pretends to resolve nothing in the pursuit of either outer beauty or “inner peace”—and is thus quintessentially Roxane Gay.

Gay is neither an overnight sensation nor a millennial, but if you know her only by her writing, you might mistake her for both. She’s been issuing rants and opinion pieces online for almost a decade, attracting an early Internet following. But it was not until the publication of her bestselling 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist (HarperPerennial, 2014)—in which Gay expounded upon everything, from rape culture to the wish fulfilment of