When I wrote my memoir, 'Hunger,' which was a memoir of my body, I was extremely worried about how it would be received, because it required a level of vulnerability I found extremely uncomfortable to write about a fat body, while living in it, without some sort of triumphant weight loss narrative. People seem to want us to have these triumphant stories, and there's not a lot of space for the in-between, where you have suffered and you're healed, but things are maybe also not OK. Few of us know how to talk about it, because we have very little language for trauma. I think and write quite a lot about trauma. And then I would write stories about the people living in those villages. I started writing when I was 4 years old. Roxane Gay, Author and Professor: A lot of times, people ask me about voice and how to find it, as if they can go on some sort of search and find voice waiting for them at the end of it.,īut in fact, we tend to already have our voices, and it's really a question of learning how to use our voices and knowing that we have every right to do so. Tonight, Gay shares her Brief But Spectacular take on ways of being heard, as part of our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas. Now a successful author, professor, and mentor to so many, she advises aspiring writers on how to harness their voices. Roxane Gay has long used writing as a means to untangle and communicate her own trauma.
