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"So many people assume that when you’re writing about trauma when you’re writing about marginalization, oppression, whatever, anything sort of negative, that you’re writing only from emotion. It made her think, though she admits she didn't emphasize it enough, how underrated a writer's job is. This was something the activist and writer learned while teaching the workshop at Yale that would inspire her essay Writing into the Wound when she saw how rawly and truthfully students addressed their wounds through writing. Traumas, says Gay, "are great equalizers." We all have traumas, but we often tend to minimize them without thinking that an unhealed wound tends to get worse and cause us untold pain. "Being fat is not a crime," she said.Įven today, many medical schools are taking the essay into account to analyze fatphobia in the medical profession. Surprisingly, Hunger had an impact not only on fat people but on the relationship many of us have with our own bodies. "For some people, writing about trauma well means that it helps them work through something." Christopher and several of his friends raped me in the woods, in an abandoned hunting cabin, where no one but those boys could hear my screams," she wrote in Hunger.
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His name wasn't really Christopher, but I don't have to tell you that. In my history of violence, there was a boy. Sometimes I feel as if the past could kill me. When Roxane published Hunger: Memories of (My) Body, the book she says she had the hardest time writing, she was addressing how traumas like the gang rape she suffered at age 12 run through people's bodies and also how normalized fatphobia is in our society. But is that going to be writing trauma well for an audience?" she asks.
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"For some people, writing about trauma well means that it helps them work through something.
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"We are walking wounds, but I'm not sure any of us know very well how to talk about it," says Gay.
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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.