By that I mean that I never allowed myself to forget what the novel was about and whose story I was trying to tell that was important to me. You allow us to see the moments when the cracks show. In depicting Mireille Duval’s ordeal and its aftermath, you’ve straddled this incredibly fine line: You write about brutality with an unflinching, exacting clarity, but the narrative has this extraordinary beauty to it, one that allows you to access the core of your characters’ experiences. The magic here is the way in which you infuse myriad complexities -family, love, betrayal, home, migration, inequality, privilege, the danger of any kind of blinders-with equal weight. Q: Your novel, An Untamed State, is about a wealthy woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom in Port-au-Prince.
ROXANE GAY ESSAYS HOW TO
So it’s been really overwhelming, but I’m going to figure out how to deal with it because it’s also really awesome. It’s been absolutely overwhelming because you work and you work and you work, and you wonder if you’re ever going to get your shot, and then it happens all at once at the most unexpected time. What does it feel like to have them both see published life at the same time? We’re seeing it as the year of Roxane Gay, but both of these books must be the culmination of years of writing, observing, thinking. Q: This is indisputably your year: a critically acclaimed debut novel, and an equally successful essay collection of cultural criticism that honestly, humorously and accessibly captures the multiplicity of your views. Steffens is a freelance journalist whose author interviews and book reviews have appeared in Time, the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, Time Out and the U.K.’s Independent on Sunday. Gay currently teaches creative writing at Purdue University.
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Her debut novel, An Untamed State, and a collection of essays, Bad Feminist, were published this year to critical acclaim. This Q&A originally appeared in the fall 2014 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.ĭaneet Steffens ’82 interviewed Roxane Gay ’92, a writer and cultural commentator who has been published everywhere from The New York Times, The Guardian and The Nation to Slate, Salon and The Rumpus. Author of Bad Feminist and NY Times columnist