#WHO IS CHRISTOPHER HUNGER ROXANE GAY HOW TO#
"We are walking wounds, but I'm not sure any of us know very well how to talk about it," says Gay. In a wonderful interview with Monica Lewinsky for Vanity Fair, Gay opens up generously and reflects on her traumas and writing. It is trauma literature - not about getting rid of a wound (there are no formulas), but about using the writing craft to connect with others and expose what the system tries to sweep under the rug.Īfter teaching a workshop at Yale on how to write about trauma, Gay has just published Writing Into The Wound, published on Scribd, and is now also leading a 20-session course on writing for social change. Roxane Gay wrote about the gang rape she suffered when she was 12 years old and how the wound leaves scars, how those scars, in turn, can become the engine of change through writing.īut it is not therapeutic writing, no. A radical act, yes, through which she has confronted us with our vision of feminisms, with fatphobia and the social control of the body, with the multiple traumas that pierce us. And she has done so on many occasions, displaying a talent that she masters with sensitivity, empathy, and large doses of truth. The writer Roxane Gay does not like to be called a brave person for exposing her own personal experiences and struggles and turning them into a book. There are also inherited traumas - historical, ancestral, familial - and yet, except for death, there is nothing more taboo in this society than the expression of one's pain and wounds.
Everyone has wounds, sometimes so deep that they come back again and again even if you think they are healed. Trauma is always both personal and social.