She later explains, “I wrote myself back together.” At a boarding school in New Hampshire, a teacher recognized Gay’s talent, as well as the violence that haunted her, and encouraged her to seek counselling and to continue to develop her writing. Struggling with her weight and her mental health in a fatphobic and unaccommodating society, Gay threw herself into writing and her trauma repeated itself on paper. She started gaining weight, trying to regain a sense of control over her body: “when I ate, I got to make my body into what I wanted it to be, which is a fortress.” The devastating trauma of sexual violence was something she didn’t speak of for a very long time. Gay talks about the captivating nature of novels and self loss in fictional worldsas a questioning young person.Īt 12 years old, amid a relatively comfortable and supported childhood, Gay’s world was turned upside down when she was raped by her boyfriend and his friends. From a very young age, she evaded loneliness and found solace in reading and writing. Her father was a civil engineer, so the family moved frequently and Gay didn’t form close friendships at school. “I am trying to become better in what I think and what I say and what I do, without abandoning what makes me human.” Roxane Gay is an essayist, novelist and speaker, as well as a self-described “bad feminist.”īorn in 1974 in Nebraska, United States, to Haitian parents, Gay was the oldest of three children.