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| Roxane Gay and young fan, Gabby |
On
Wednesday, some 400 people, mostly women, filled the Jewish Community Center
(JCC) in New Orleans to hear Roxane Gay in conversation with local author Maurice Ruffin about
Gay's memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My)
Body. The event was hosted by Octavia Books.
Roxane
Gay was just as dazzling and funny as she is in print, and in her tweets. The
New York Times best-selling author has 238 K Twitter followers and counting.
She dispels fears and phobias about using the word, fat. And we're not talking about Fat as in, do these jeans make my butt look fat, but Fat in only the way a woman who has been
300 pounds overweight can reclaim the word. Gay makes it clear to anyone not
familiar with her or her work that she is an expert on being fat in the world. As
an adult who has lived with fat body since she was a teenage girl who was
raped, Gay sets the rules for how she's going to take control of her body.
Recently, she told her family her body was off limits for discussion. It's hard
to believe that recent interviewers have deigned to give her advice about weight
and dieting.
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| Roxane Gay and Maurice Ruffin |
Maurice
Ruffin, on the other hand, conducted a safe and comfortable interview space and
presented an intimate conversation even though there were hundreds of people in
the room. The interview filled the audience with joy and laughter. Gay noted in response to a question about the source of her humor,
"I'm just funny;" she also shared that her parents are hilarious. Of
the interview, local writer, Alexandra Reisner, said:
"She was very funny and unrehearsed. It didn't feel like watching an
interview, it felt like talking to a friend. The questions
Maurice asked were specific but also open so she could explore and go
where she wanted to with the answers. He didn't try too much to guide or dominate
the conversation, he just gave her the framework."
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| Alexandra Reisner and SRO crowd |
Maurice Ruffin can be credited with asking Roxane Gay a
question she had never been asked before, "What's your favorite and least
favorite food?" Dr. Gay answered that she is a super picky eater and would
have to say a rib eye steak medium-rare is her favorite, along with any kind of
a sandwich. She also took the air out of the room when she announced that she
hated avocados. Four hundred people gasped at the same time. "I'm over
it," she said as she explained that as a Haitian, she grew up eating
plenty of them.
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| A patient Roxane Gay signs 400 copies of her memoir in New Orleans. |
The world is lucky that Roxane Gay has known she wanted to
become a writer since she was 4 years old. Her memoir, Hunger, is not an inspirational weight loss story, but a telling of
one woman's truth and a narrative that forced her to face her body and to make
changes to feel better, for herself, and not for any societal pressure. However,
her journey as an acclaimed published author is certainly inspirational. She spoke
about her beginnings as a blogger of rejection and writing about how hurtful
those rejections were, yet still being relentless about sending work out, sometimes
sending a new piece the very next moment to the same editor who rejected her. She
advised to wait a bit.
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