![avclub hunger roxane gay avclub hunger roxane gay](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_450,pg_1,q_80,w_800/fsy3zubkszethtzfecyf.jpg)
![avclub hunger roxane gay avclub hunger roxane gay](https://i0.wp.com/www.aerogrammestudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Roxane-Gay-Skillshare-Giveaway.png)
I just thought, Great, I’m going to reach my fat brethren, yay.
![avclub hunger roxane gay avclub hunger roxane gay](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JtLW7_epCw4/maxresdefault.jpg)
It was surprising, because I did not expect the book to resonate with as many people as it did, and with as many people who were not fat. Did that mitigate some of the experiences you were having with the press? What was that like? You had an outpouring of that after Hunger. I’ve written about my trauma and what ends up feeling meaningful to me is when someone connects with it in a way that helps them. But is that going to be writing trauma well for an audience? And which audience? You really do have to think through these questions as you’re writing trauma and decide, what is your end goal? And what are you going to consider a success? For some people, writing about trauma well means that it helps them work through something. That’s a good question, and I think a lot of the time what we mean by writing well is very subjective and there can be a lot of different criteria.
AVCLUB HUNGER ROXANE GAY HOW TO
It got me thinking, how do we teach people how to take a trauma-whether it’s theirs or someone else’s a cultural trauma, collective trauma, so on-and write about it in ways that can be more than just catharsis? Over the course of the semester my students were really astonishing in the different ways that they approached the topic and tried to answer the question I posed to them at the beginning of the semester which is, “How do we write trauma, and how do we do it well?” It really helped me to further refine my thinking.ĭoes “writing trauma well” fall under the category of what we would normally say is “good” writing? Or does writing trauma well mean that it’s effective in a different way? And I was in the unfortunate position of having to reject these truly painful stories that clearly took quite a lot for the writers to submit. Most of the submissions were just straight testimony. I thought of the class after asking myself, how do we write about trauma? And how do we write about it well? I had edited an anthology called Not That Bad, a compilation of women writing about their experiences with rape culture. Roxane Gay: I don’t know that it changed my thoughts, but it certainly expanded them and helped me develop a stronger understanding. I’m sure few would wonder why I was interested in talking to her about this particular essay-which we did via a Zoom call from our respective Los Angeles homes-about the nuance and intricacy involved in writing about one’s trauma for public consumption. Roxane and I have known each other for a few years and, of course, my awareness of and admiration for her writing predated that. The piece is well hewn but expansive, exploring the ways in which we reveal ourselves through writing-by choice, as in the detailing of an assault, or more obliquely, as in how a journalist describes a piece of writing about an assault, and the writer who experienced it. In her new essay, she describes the book’s reception-overwhelmingly positive responses from readers, while interviews with some members of the media ranged from misinformed to callous-and how the experience of writing the book led to further questions of how to depict trauma in writing. I could admit this thing had happened to me, but I was not ready to share the details.” Finally, in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay wrote “directly and openly about my sexual assault, how it changed me, how that assault has haunted me for more than thirty years.” “I wrote around it,” she writes of that book’s description of the assault.
![avclub hunger roxane gay avclub hunger roxane gay](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRzWTIZXIAAWlxX.jpg)
The piece, inspired by an undergraduate workshop Gay taught at Yale on writing trauma, describes Gay’s experience attempting to write about being gang-raped at age 12, first in fictional stories written as a teenager, “melodramatic and overwrought and dark and graphic,” and then, as an adult, in work like her essay collection Bad Feminist. “We are walking wounds, but I am not sure any of us know quite how to talk about it,” writes Roxane Gay in her new essay, “Writing Into the Wound,” published on Scribd.