With a line out the door and then everyone waiting patiently to take their seats, the Golden Tribe Lecture Series’ “An Evening with Roxane Gay” promised to be one to remember. Along with every student ticket came a copy of Gay’s Difficult Women to the eager audience that filled the auditorium. Gay visited Florida State University this past evening to impart her words of wisdom, her experience as an author, and stories from her past that shaped her. She lit up the space with her knowledge and charm, sitting simply on a loveseat center stage of the Ruby Diamond Auditorium, as she humbly introduced herself.
Beginning with a reading from her most recent memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, she shared favorite passages and offered insight into how they reflected how she felt as an overweight, African-American woman. The memoir explores the way food and human bodies take on different purposes in times during and post-trauma (particularly from her own gang-rape at the age of 12) and the consequences that come with being overweight as a result. Gay explained the difficulty that came with releasing for publication a piece that was so incredibly personal and vulnerable, and how she needed to wait almost a year after finishing it before she was ready to put it out for the world to read. She explained that although a subject she shied away from writing on for many years, she knew that because it was so difficult and uncomfortable that it was a story that needed to be told. The passages shared included the prejudice that comes with being “fatter than Lane Bryant fat” and the toll it takes when your body is “subject to commentary” from every stranger who thinks they are the wiser on your health and life. She highlighted her humorous side with sections about her disdain for perfectly sculpted personal trainers telling her what to do and learning to cook for herself as a form of self-love through Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa cooking program. Even in her closing passage from the novel taking the most serious tone, the subject of Googling one of her rapists decades later, Gay gave insight into the power of telling one’s story no matter how uncomfortable it may be and the difficulties that come with the infiniteness of healing.
Closing her copy of Hunger, she looked and admitted that there would be nothing worse than hearing herself speak for an hour, so she opened up the floor to field questions from the audience. The Q&A portion covered a variety of topics ranging from Gay’s authorship of the “Black Panther: World of Wakanda” comics the struggles of being a woman of color in the feminist community, the best methods from her experience in healing from trauma no matter how far in the past, her take on the body positivity movements and the double-standard that exists, and advice for up and coming writers. She expressed her desire to work on a Batgirl or Luke Cage film in the future and what a big opportunity that would be as the next step in her involvement with comic books and their adaptations. When questioned about body positivity, she made clear that while nobody lives in isolation and that there should be positivity for every kind of body, the intensity of prejudice is much higher towards female and fat bodies. In speaking about the difficulties of being black in the feminist community, she gave a crucial piece of advice for the evening stating that although it is frustrating to not be welcome at times, the key is to make your own space within the community. In regard to the feminist community, being a woman of color “playing the race card,” or within an authorial space, she asserted that one must be willing to make other people uncomfortable for change to occur and that you have as much right to be there and speaking your truth as much as anyone else does. She went further into her dealing with trauma and grief, giving the words of wisdom that there is no end point to when the healing process and that it’s okay to never fully be 100% “healed” in that process, tying it back to Hunger and how it touches on her rape that she still works to deal with 30 years later.
The most memorable advice she gave, personally, was that regarding being a writer. In her lecture, she gave the following words of guidance:
- Always take your craft seriously
- Whether or not something comes of it, you are a writer
- Rejection is inevitable, but be relentless
- Know that you have a voice
- No one can narrate the world the way you can
- Don’t make yourself the hero or victim of your own story
- Revision is not that important!
To each question Gay replied with poise and thoughtfulness, leaving the audience with a sense of awe and newfound power. She imparted upon those present the knowledge of someone having lived every experience and the hope for those who heard her use what they learned to make understand where they have been, have a grasp on who they are, and get started on who they will become. Her lecture certainly was one for the books.
Get a taste of Roxane Gay from her TED Talk (link: https://www.ted.com/talks/roxane_gay_confessions_of_a_bad_feminist) and exploring her incredible body of work (link: http://www.roxanegay.com/writing/)