Did revisiting these through the context of your body change how you saw those moments? There are moments here where you have to revisit traumatic moments-the sexual assault, the bad relationships. And maybe it's time I treat my body better. This body has actually served me quite well for many, many years. It certainly helped me to have more kindness for myself-to look back at myself and realize I've been through a lot. But when I finally started writing the book, I realized I carry a lot of shame and I don't want to. I often told myself I had no shame about my body. Did that offer any relief or catharsis for you? That felt unexpected to me-the honesty of confronting it, of naming it about your own body. You talk, frequently, in this book about shame. That really was informative and infuriating.
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A bunch of generally white men are in a room somewhere making decisions about millions of people. They decided on 25 because it's a nice, round number. The measure for Body Mass Index (BMI), for instance, is so fucking arbitrary. I learned some incredibly interesting things. Even if I wasn't necessarily going to write about it explicitly, I wanted to be informed. I did a lot of research about bodies, fat, fatness, that sort of thing. You examine Oprah, for instance, losing and gaining weight while owning shares in weight-loss solutions. You also talk quite a lot about dieting and the weight-loss industry. I acknowledge that and I'm working on it. I believe in body positivity, but I also know that I struggle with it. In establishing that narrative, you do explore the idea of body positivity, but don't seem entirely aligned with that movement either. But I don't know if I'll ever overcome the ways in which I was treated for daring to be fat." "I've told my parents many times that I'm as over being raped as I'll ever be. I don't think you have to cannibalize yourself to tell an important story or to write about yourself. I tried to not write about my relationships too much or about my family. You can't give the reader everything-you have to hold something back for yourself. I had to negotiate what I would and would not write about. How was the process of this different from other books you've written? I just knew this was the book I wanted to write the least, so it was the book I probably should write the most. It was an undertaking to write this book. From a structural standpoint, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts was a big influence. As I wrote, these parts of my life certainly became entwined with my body. I actually sold Hunger in April of 2014, just before Bad Feminist came out, but I didn't seriously start writing it until August of 2016. But I also did not want to write a book about my body. I knew that I wanted to write a book about my body. Did you set out for it to become that as well?
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It is obviously a memoir of body, but also of your life. VICE: Hunger is an incredibly compelling and intimate book. Our interview was the sixth of 18 she had scheduled that day. I spoke with her earlier this week about the fat body, society, and closure. Fame has not changed her-in fact, if anything, she has become even more herself. Her edits were strong, and we quickly became friends. I first met Roxane Gay in 2008, when she published my first short story in PANK Magazine, a literary journal she co-founded. Hunger is the result of a writer stripping down, exposing everything, delivering a pound of flesh in pages. The word "brave" is often employed to describe books like Hunger, but I think the word "bare" might be more apt. The book is unflinching: Gay describes her rape at the age of 12 and her subsequent attempt to become as large as a "fortress" in order to make sure no man wanted to hurt her again. Her latest book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, offers some of her most personal writing yet. Now, the Nebraska-born, Indiana-based writer (and VICE Fiction Issue contributor) is charting new territory: Her own body. Whether it's her bestselling essay collection, 2014's Bad Feminist, her op-eds in the New York Times, or her outspoken politics-most notably on display when she pulled her book from Simon and Schuster in protest of alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos's then-book deal-Gay has established herself as a voice to turn to when considering the uncomfortable and the incendiary.
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She generates books, articles, and concepts faster than anyone, it seems, examining everything from feminism to cooking shows, from Black Lives Matter to the new Beyoncé album. Gay's immense popularity has as much to do with her talent as her work ethic.