Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is an American writer, editor, and cultural critic whose essays and memoir examine feminism, race, body politics, and popular culture with sharp intelligence and personal candor.

Roxane Gay is one of the most distinctive and influential essayists writing in America today. Bad Feminist, her 2014 collection, established her voice: self-examining, politically engaged, willing to hold contradictions without resolving them. The title essay’s central argument — that you can be feminist and still enjoy things that don’t align perfectly with feminist theory — gave permission to a generation of readers who felt the gap between their politics and their appetites. The collection ranges across popular culture, race, gender, and academic life with consistent sharpness and honesty about Gay’s own complicity and inconsistency.

Hunger, her 2017 memoir, is a more difficult and more concentrated book. It confronts Gay’s relationship with her body — the weight she gained after a gang rape at age twelve, and her complex feelings about her size, visibility, and desire — with extraordinary courage and almost no consolation. It is one of the most honest books about body image and sexual trauma published in recent memory, and its refusal to offer a redemptive arc makes it more honest than more commercially comfortable memoirs.

Gay is not a writer who tells readers what they want to hear. Her willingness to complicate her own positions and to acknowledge where cultural criticism fails personal experience gives her work unusual depth. Both books are essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary feminist writing.