When you were writing "An Untamed State," did you talk with your parents at all about it? Have they read it?Ī. I loved "Room." Because it did something so unexpected with trauma, and the narrative point of view really surprised me. "Room" was definitely one of the books I had in mind as I wrote this. The way you handle the PTSD part of Mireille's experience, in the second half of the book, made me think of Emma Donoghue's "Room."Ī. I think you should have to look away, or feel compelled to look away. I was very committed to being explicit in the violence, because I think all too often violence is really stylized and we can watch it. But I also realized I was onto something because I felt it so deeply as I was writing the novel. There were times where I thought, this is hard, and I would have to walk away for a little bit, because it was so intense and heartbreaking, some of the things that Mireille goes through. Was it difficult or painful to imagine or write those scenes?Ī. In "An Untamed State," Mireille undergoes some brutal sexual violence. I really wanted to explore, what are the consequences of great economic disparity? Who ends up suffering for those choices that are made? The novel rose out of that. After I published the story, those characters simply wouldn't leave me alone. I wrote a short story in 2009 called "Things I Know About Fairy Tales." It was about the same story as the novel. There was a cost and I wanted to explore that. The older I got, the more I realized there was another side to paradise. We would play on the beach and go to the mountains and had adventures. When I went to Haiti as a child, it was awesome. Could you talk about the germinating impulse for "An Untamed State"?Ī. My questions and her answers are condensed and edited for clarity. We spoke when she visited Milwaukee's Boswell Book Company. In August she's moving to Purdue University as an associate professor of creative writing.
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Gay, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Ill. Gay is also an active, must-follow presence on Twitter: Her 74,000-plus tweets to date are dotted with occasional commentary on her obsessions, which include "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" and Channing Tatum. "As a black girl, as a Haitian girl, I was not supposed to see myself in the Sweet Valley High books, but I did."īoth books take up, in an unflinching way, the reality of sexual violence against women. Beyond several pieces that grapple with what it means to be a feminist, Gay writes with probing intelligence about pop-culture topics from the morality of Tyler Perry to how much the Sweet Valley High books mattered to her. In August, Harper Perennial will publish "Bad Feminist: Essays," a collection of Gay's writing first published at outlets that range from Virginia Quarterly Review and The Rumpus to Buzzfeed. Comparing it to dark Brothers Grimm tales, Bass wrote that the novel's "complex and fragile moral (is) arrived at through great pain and high cost." Gay's recently released debut novel, "An Untamed State" (Black Cat / Grove Press), the story of a young mother kidnapped for ransom by a Haitian gang, earned a glowing review from Holly Bass in The New York Times Book Review. Roxane Gay's breakout year should give readers hope that serious writers still have a place in the hot mess of today's publishing industry.