I wanted to lose myself because I was losing my mind. I pretended to be anyone but myself, hoping I could lose myself in the virtual world.
I monopolized the phone line and used a modem to navigate the early internet, which is to say I spent a lot of time talking to strange men about sex. I moved with a roommate into an apartment off-campus above a small grocery store. I loved reading and I loved writing, so surely studying reading and writing would be a natural fit. Finally, at the end of my sophomore year, I settled on English. I loved technical theater and spent an inordinate amount of time on drama productions, designing and building sets, running soundboards, doing whatever needed to be done to make a show come alive from behind the scenes. I worked part-time in a computer lab in the cross-campus underground library. I had good ideas, but I struggled with physics, the laws of gravity, and designing structures that could realistically exist. In the studio, late at night, I would cut cork sheets with my X-Acto knife, and sometimes my hands. In an urban planning class, I learned about how a city is designed and the importance of green space. I loved building models and imagining what structures could be. My father is a civil engineer, so I hoped that an understanding of structures was part of my genetic inheritance. As the semester progressed, I was slow to make sense of the course material and quick to understand that I was one of the dilettantes he was so eager to dissuade from the medical profession.Īt the beginning of my sophomore year, I decided I would be an architect. And then I took introductory biology with a professor who told the hundreds of eager students sitting before him that his class was designed to separate the biology dilettantes from the students who had the potential to become doctors. I began as a premed student, because I had an elaborate fantasy about becoming an emergency room doctor, fast on my feet, saving lives, engaging in torrid affairs with my fellow doctors, sex in on-call rooms, living a grand life. IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, I was a rising junior at Yale University.
#ROXANE GAY HUNGER AMAZON FULL#
“To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.” Full of wisdom and rage and grace, Writing into the Wound is a remarkable consideration of where we are, and where we need to go, by one of the finest authors and cultural critics of her generation. “To change the world, we need to face what has become of it,” she writes. That sounds terrifying, but it is an opportunity.” There is a before and an after, and the world will never again be what it once was. Just as she writes her way through her own traumas and coaches her students to do the same, she urges us to take a long, hard look at the wounds we all share: “The world as we knew it has broken wide open. To make sense of our pain, she suggests, we need to explore it fully, even as we’re still in the midst of it. COVID-19, racial and economic inequality, political strife, imminent environmental disaster, and more: Gay catalogs it all with her trademark candor and authority. In her Scribd Original Writing into the Wound, Gay not only talks openly about trauma in her personal life-from her fraught time as an undergraduate at Yale to the stress of returning there as a visiting professor to the fallout from Hunger-but also about the collective trauma we’ve experienced this past year. By exploring trauma publicly, Gay suffered more of it. The response to Hunger by some critics who seemed to take perverse pleasure in highlighting Gay’s vulnerabilities was itself a fresh wound. In her 2017 memoir Hunger, she addressed that trauma head-on, writing with bracing honesty about her body and the ways that food can be used both to bury pain and make oneself disappear. As a young girl, she was the victim of a horrifying act of violence that changed her life and would strongly influence her career as a writer.
“ Roxane Gay seems to have a knack for fearlessly telling the truth.” - The New York Timesįrom the bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, an unforgettable, deeply personal look at how trauma has shaped her life and work-and what all of us need to do to come to grips with the collective suffering of the past year.īestselling author and cultural icon Roxane Gay is no stranger to trauma.