It was difficult just getting started and wrapping my head around the topic, just facing the level of vulnerability that it demanded. When the book was supposed to come out, I knew there was no way to get it done in time, so I asked for an extension. Tell me about the writing process for this book. We spoke to her about being vulnerable, being a public figure, and who this book is for. Gay will read from her book at Athens’s 40 Watt Club on Wednesday, June 21, and at Agnes Scott’s Gaines Chapel on Thursday, June 22. Gay discusses her personal struggle with gaining and trying to lose weight through personal narrative and the cultural criticism she became known for in her 2014 breakout Bad Feminist. It’s the feminist writer’s fourth book and second released just this year, but it’s also her most vulnerable, recounting the story of how she put on weight to cope with the trauma of being gang raped at age 12.
The story of my body is not a story of triumph,” Roxane Gay writes in the second chapter of her new memoir, Hunger.
