He’s reflecting on his tenure at The Rumpus, where he was managing editor from 2009 to 2013, where Gay published many of the pieces-including “What We Hunger For”-that would go on to be collected in Bad Feminist, and where Gay served as essays editor from 2012 to 2014. “It feels like I watched her career take off,” BuzzFeed books editor Isaac Fitzgerald adds. But the reality is more complicated and, like the slow build of a hurricane, more powerful. The coverage accompanying its publication cast Gay as sudden literary sensation, a tornado that had touched down from out of nowhere. That essay was anthologized in Bad Feminist, the New York Times -bestselling book that launched Gay to the national stage. “You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you.” Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods.” A coworker walked in on me crying in my cubicle in the middle of the day. “I learned a long time ago that life often introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for,” she writes, “even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. (“Editorially speaking, it was fucking brilliant,” Rumpus editor Julie Greicius, who worked with Gay on the essay, says of the pairing.) It fell like a punch. I remember when I first read “What We Hunger For” in 2010, which connects The Hunger Games ’s woodsy heroine, Katniss Everdeen, to Roxane’s own life.
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“It’s full of desires and emotion and needs.” Of her stories frequent co-mingling of sex with trauma, she explains, “sexual violence appears in my work because sexual violence appears in the world we live in.” For her the question is “how to write it ethically, how to write about it in ways that aren’t gratuitous.” “Sex is full of narrative potential,” Gay tells me over the phone. Much of her best writing is also her most intense: the essay “What We Hunger For,” in which Gay first describes being raped in the woods at age twelve by a group of boys An Untamed State, her debut novel, about kidnapping, assault, and its aftermath the story “Break All the Way Down” in her most recent book, Difficult Women, about a woman who seeks out violent sex after her child’s death. Her work returns again and again to issues of power, the body, desire, trauma, survival, truth. Yet Gay sells hundreds of thousands of books, fills up dozens of auditoriums, attracts attention off and online not just because she’s that good-though she is-but because her goodness cuts to the quick of human experience. “Roxane Gay has the range,” Saeed Jones, BuzzFeed’s executive editor of culture, tells me over the phone. What is its source? With a novel ( Untamed State ), two short story collections ( Ayiti and Difficult Women ), a blockbuster book of essays ( Bad Feminist ), a comic book (Marvel’s World of Wakanda ), a professorship (at Purdue University), and several more projects in the works (another adult novel, a YA novel, two works of nonfiction- Hunger and the aforementioned How to Be Heard -as well as a screenplay), in addition to her active and delightful social media accounts-Gay’s output, from the outside, can look like a force of nature. It’s a love that is both gift and mandate. Cheryl Strayed receives this same generous, impossible attention: so do John Darnielle, J.K.
The prevalent sense among her fans of you understand me perfectly but you don’t know it is on the one hand is true-Gay’s writing can and does offer that understanding to readers-but on the other isn’t-Gay the person doesn’t, and can’t, know the vast majority of her readers from Adam. Gay attracts a specific kind of devotion few writers receive: not only the dispassionate admiration that comes from her mastery of craft and story, but also the intimate adoration that people also often feel for a crush or the band they listen to during a break up. Keep it up ,” Gay tweeted over the weekend. “White man just walked by me, threw his fist in the air, and shouted Roxane, keep hope alive. The news still rippled through the convention center in early February. Two weeks before, on January 25, Gay pulled her forthcoming book, How to Be Heard, from Simon & Schuster after learning they had offered famous-internet-bigot Milo Yiannopoulos a book deal. People stop in their tracks and stare, people shout out exhortations of her greatness, drinks appear unbidden for her at the crowded hotel bar, bras are offered for signing. In the world of writers-and specifically the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in DC-Roxane Gay is a rock star.