To make sense of our pain, she suggests, we need to explore it fully, even as we’re still in the midst of it. COVID-19, racial and economic inequality, political strife, imminent environmental disaster, and more: Gay catalogs it all with her trademark candor and authority. In her Scribd Original Writing into the Wound, Gay not only talks openly about trauma in her personal life-from her fraught time as an undergraduate at Yale to the stress of returning there as a visiting professor to the fallout from Hunger-but also about the collective trauma we’ve experienced this past year. By exploring trauma publicly, Gay suffered more of it. The response to Hunger by some critics who seemed to take perverse pleasure in highlighting Gay’s vulnerabilities was itself a fresh wound.
In her 2017 memoir Hunger, she addressed that trauma head-on, writing with bracing honesty about her body and the ways that food can be used both to bury pain and make oneself disappear. As a young girl, she was the victim of a horrifying act of violence that changed her life and would strongly influence her career as a writer. From the bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, an unforgettable, deeply personal look at how trauma has shaped her life and work-and what all of us need to do to come to grips with the collective suffering of the past year.īestselling author and cultural icon Roxane Gay is no stranger to trauma.
