The weight of her voice
When cultural critic, essayist, novelist and feminist Roxane Gay was 12, she was brutally gang- raped in an abandoned cabin in the woods near her nice suburban home by a group of boys, one of whom she considered a close friend.
In her introduction to this frank memoir which she frames as her “history of violence”, she makes it clear that rather than identifying as a survivor — and thus diminishing the gravity of what happened to her — she sees herself as a victim who survived.
This is the story of how a bouncy, bright young girl from a loving middle- class family of Haitian immigrants was left broken, traumatised and silenced and how she created what she refers to as “a cage” for her body by feeding an insatiable hunger to stop hurting.
“I made myself bigger. I made myself safer. I created a distinct boundary between myself and anyone who dared approach me,” she writes.
Splitting her story into two distinct parts — simply before she gained weight and after she gained weight, and before the rape and after the rape — Gay, who says she is referred to as “super morbidly obese” according to the BMI, resists the temptation to write around the horrific event which has had such a lasting impact on her.
Writing about body image, sexuality, race, gender and the farreaching, chilling repercussions of sexual violence in this open, upsetting and visceral account of the pain of being “extraordinarily visible but invisible,” Gay is simultaneously vulnerable, damaged, staunch, unapologetic, bold, opinionated, bright and spiky.
Unembellished and plainly written with clarity in an almost flat style and very occasionally repetitive, there is no glossing over here.
Though Gay writes that “mine is not a success story. Mine is simply a true story,” we should be grateful she found solace through her passion and talent for theatre, reading, writing which has ended her silence, establishing her as an important, powerful and necessary voice.