Reading the book is to witness the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious body – in combat for years. As a writer, she can rise above her body and the humiliations of the flesh. Throughout the book, two selves exist in tandem: Gay as writer and as a woman living her life. Fatness was home in a game of chase: “a place where no one can get you”. The fatter her body became, the safer she felt. She makes it persuasively plain that fatness began as a response to rape. And although Gay regrets she is unable to go as far as the campaigners who rejoice in their size, she does want us to rethink what fatness can mean.įor Gay, overeating was, for a while, her solution. The book is an attempt to see fat in its complexity, its contrariness – as potentially more than a physical problem to be overcome. Yet this is no attention-seeking misery memoir.
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“They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.” One reads about the unthinkable abuse she suffered – the boy holding her wrists and spitting in her face after raping her is a particularly upsetting detail – and feels as shaken as if one were directly witnessing what she describes. She drags her account on to the page – faltering, incomplete, unsensational. They were in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods in Omaha, Nebraska, where no one but the boys could hear her screams.
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“That something terrible broke me.” Aged 12, she was gang-raped by “a boy I thought I loved, and a group of his friends”. “Something terrible happened,” she writes. Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened A personal story, with implications for us all. We should not take up space.” But her book is a bid to take up space in another sense, to tell a story that wants to shrink into invisibility yet needs to be told. She remarks with devastating simplicity: “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. To some extent, she is on the side of Susie Orbach. She does not duck from telling us, early on, that at 6ft 3in tall, she weighed, at her heaviest, 577 pounds: “That is a staggering number, one I hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.” She does – and does not – know, she says, how things got so out of hand. Hunger tells a story that must have been as hard to write as it is disturbing to read. Gay’s last book, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller and revealed her to be a writer unfazed by inconvenient truths and a champion of women – especially gay and black women. United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.F at is more than a feminist issue – as this extraordinary memoir by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay reveals. In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.” Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.
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Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging.
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A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia.