I think about the negative responses within the fat community to Gabourey Sidibe and Ashley Nell Tipton ’s weight-loss surgery, and, a movement so dominated by white women telling women of colour who are trying to live in showbusiness and fashion that they have to just swallow it every day …įor the greater good.
It seems as if the next frontier in fat activism is figuring out how to let people actually have the feelings that they have about their bodies without validating our culture’s hierarchy of bodies. At this point the surgery would be the cheapest thing I do.’ Photograph: Jennifer Silverberg/The Guardian Roxane Gay: ‘I’ve spent at least $150,000 on weight loss. That is something I do enjoy writing about, as much as one can enjoy it, because it just boggles the mind that we’re still having these conversations about equitable access to women’s healthcare. I’m really interested in writing about reproductive freedom. I love writing about gender-related issues. My favourite things to write about are pop culture – I love writing about pop culture. So, what are you passionate about? What are your favourite things to write about? We’re expected to only be activists or people who are singular and can only write about the self. And it’s so unfair and it’s so limiting, and it shows that marginalised people aren’t allowed to be artists. But the cultural imagination is very limited, and when you talk about one issue, people think that you’re the spokesperson for that issue and that you don’t have the range, that that’s all you’re capable of doing, whether it’s racism or fatness or trolling on the internet. And it seems like a through-line, even in Bad Feminist, that you never asked to be an activist or a representative. We’re forced into these niches in a way that white men never are. I was just talking to Ijeoma Oluo, my sister-in-law, and it’s not like Ijeoma’s favourite thing is racism and it’s the only thing she wants to talk about. I never wanted to write about my body, and I didn’t want to write about being harassed on the internet. The reality is that a lot of the non-fiction that I write is on difficult stuff, so it can be challenging. It depends on the kind of non-fiction that I’m writing. But even if it were true, there’s this smug sense that it’s just: “Oh, I’m sitting in my bed and I opened up my heart-locket diary and I’m just jotting down some thoughts!” and it’s just all emotion and that none of it is intellectual.Ĭorrect, because no one’s calling. The opening lines were that I came to fame as a diarist, which is just not true. Today, the New Yorker called me a “diarist”. The two negative reviews that I’ve gotten have called me a populist, and … It is a lot to get past, and what’s interesting is that even other writers who know better will dismiss the work that you’re doing.
People already don’t take you seriously as a woman, people don’t take you seriously as a fat person, people don’t take you seriously as a black woman. You have to organise things, and you have to make decisions, and you have to think about voice and style and it’s a lot of work.Īnd there are layers of people not taking you seriously. Yeah, like: “Oh yeah, I just sort of jotted down a few memories,” but no, that’s not true. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay Photograph: PR Company Handout So, how do you walk that line between maintaining your dignity and not just letting people eat you alive? And hearing the stories of fat women helped me, it made my life better, and I think it does make a difference in terms of the general perception of us. But I guess, on the other hand, telling these stories is cathartic. LW: I’m resentful of the way that fat people and also, especially, rape victims are expected to just flay themselves and let any old person dig around inside them to earn their humanity. I sat down with her at home in Los Angeles. Gay may not want to be a spokesperson for all fat people – Hunger is adamantly her story, not a universal story – but the fact is that thin people will read this book and be changed. Lines such as, “I am always uncomfortable or in pain,” leave you no wiggle room to turn away from empathy. There’s something about honesty this bare – you cannot argue with it. We don’t hold back when we talk to ourselves about ourselves, and that’s what Gay has given us here: elegantly rendered essays with the intimacy of an inner monologue.
But, you realise, anything less would be dishonest.
You yearn for Gay to be a little kinder to herself as she glides through her past, reckoning with all the things she did with her body and, more significantly, the things that were done to it. R oxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was described to me by multiple people as an almost unbearably brutal book, and it is.