And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.” We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. “This is what most girls are taught-that we should be slender and small. I know hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.” “My father believes hunger is in the mind. “ The Biggest Loser is an unholy union of capitalism and the weight loss industrial complex.” And just to write a complex story of a body.”
… I wanted to write a counter-narrative that you can have an active, fulfilling life and you can struggle with weight and be interested in weight loss, but not have figured it all out, but also not be full of self-loathing. When I was doing research for Hunger I looked up a bunch of writers who had written that book, and they’d all gained the weight back. They’re standing on the cover of their book in half of their formerly fat pants, like, ‘I’ve done it.’ And yeah, I would love to write that book. “When we read nonfiction about weight, it’s someone who has lost all of the weight and has figured it out. “I think writing always gives us control over the things that we can’t actually control in our lives, so taking control of the narrative of my body as a public space was absolutely helpful in terms of thinking about my relationship to my body.” I just tell myself, Oh girl, no one’s going to read it, and that makes it a lot easier. If I think too much about it, I absolutely will chicken out because it’s terrifying to think of people reading these personal revelations.
Yeah, that’s how I get through all of the writing that I do that’s personal in nature. “I told myself that no one was going to read it. Because it was something I was dreading.” In that moment I knew the thing I needed to write about the most was fatness. “I was thinking about what my next nonfiction project was going to be and I thought, The thing I want to write about the least is fatness. So I always put that first before anything else, because when I’m walking down the street people see my blackness first-and my size.” I start with black women because I think black women are the least respected and least heard voices in the world.
"In general I write for marginalized people. “I’m pretty shy and quiet, but writing is a place where I don’t have to be shy or quiet. And as Isaac Bashevis Singer counsels, I seek to both inform and entertain.”
“As a black, bisexual woman I am writing into and against a culture that tries to make me and people like me invisible and silent. “A lot of people say you can’t make money from writing. I did not know there was anything beyond that to dream.” I never dared imagine or dream anything beyond that. “To write a good book worthy of publication-that was the dream. “If having a personality and having opinions makes me difficult, then yes, I am very difficult.” Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief To celebrate this live episode of Design Matters, here are 27 Roxane Gay quotes that reveal, bit by bit, her bold and vital voice on the literary and cultural landscapes today. And in a world of mirages online and off, that is an immensely powerful and revolutionary thing. “Otherwise, if I got hired as the person I was pretending to be, I would have to keep up that pretense for the rest of my career.”Ĭontradictions and all, Roxane Gay is herself.
When Lifehacker asked her for the best advice she has ever received, she said, simply, it was when she was preparing for a job interview in academia and her friend Matt Seigel advised her to be herself. But one can also find great inspiration in Gay herself. One can find great inspiration in Gay’s prose. … Consider me knocked off that pedestal before you ever try to put me up there.” When they disappoint us, we gleefully knock them from the very pedestal we put them on. “We have this tendency to put visible feminists on a pedestal. As Gay detailed on the TED stage, yes, she is a feminist-but she dubs herself a bad one for things like her love of catchy rap that’s derogatory to females, or her belief that a woman can take a man’s surname if she wants to. Her profound literary side coexists with her love of the Fast and the Furious franchise, and her prose is often composed as episodes of “Law and Order: SVU” play in the background. But Roxane Gay burns bright with brilliant contradictions.