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Who do you see as the audience for this book? To encourage people to think more carefully about bodies other than their own. To write about a different kind of body experience than what we normally see written about. I had been avoiding a book on fatness, so that’s how I knew it was probably the book I needed to write most. I was thinking about what my next nonfiction book should be. I stay informed and care deeply, but I listen.
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often times with international affairs I try to learn and listen because I’m not an expert in those areas. I ask myself, “When is it time to say something on an issue?” or “When is it a good time for me to read about it or listen to others?” I use that rubric to weigh in. How do you handle being seen as an authority? Many people ask you for your opinion on everything from politics to pop culture. I respect that people see me as someone to go to on certain topics and someone who is an authority, but that’s not me-it’s how other people see me. Writing that vulnerability is something I did not enjoy, but the book needed it. I don’t think the two things are contradictory. You are now seen as a voice of feminism, but this book is incredibly vulnerable. 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.
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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.