In a heart-wrenching chapter, Gay recounts her experience being sexually assaulted by the boy she liked (and several of his friends) at the age of 12. Coming from a loving Haitian-American family, her size was a source of unending concern - and for many years, she was unable to explain to them why she wasn’t interested in changing it. She writes about being subject to fat camps, considering gastric bypass surgery and enduring judgment from strangers peering into her grocery cart. She shares that it became a “problem” by the time she was a teenager and at her heaviest, she weighed 577 pounds. Her latest work is deeply personal, focusing on her relationship with her body.
“Bad feminist” Roxane Gay has had a prolific year: she published a book of short stories in January and just six months later is releasing a memoir, Hunger.Īuthor of the New York Times bestselling book of essays Bad Feminist, Gay is a novelist, cultural critic and professor - who, in addition to being an influential public intellectual, seems like she’s a ton of fun to hang out with based on her enthusiastic and hilarious live-tweeting of The Bachelor.
