More of Roxane seeing the better things about life and herself. More about moving forward, even if it is impossible to truly move on. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it.” This isn’t to say that there are not heartbreaking moments in the last third of the book merely that they are eclipsed by the things that have made her the stronger person she finds herself to be today. Having read Bad Feminist a couple years ago, I was not taken unawares by the story of Gay’s rape, or of her reaction to it. But the visceral reaction to her blatant, open words, could not be escaped. “Food was not only comfort food also became my friend because it was constant and I didn’t need to be anything but myself when I ate.” You can have knowledge that prepares you for reading such an experience, but we can never be truly prepared for Gay’s words before they come out in her deliberate, heartbreaking way. While the description of the event that changed her life is terrible, her recounting of the aftermath is devastating. There is a darling story about her Haitian American family having meals around the table, and the loving relationship she had with her mother, at least for a brief time. The brief stints that allow you to smile, getting little glimpses into the time before, are sweet. They help you bolster your heart for the rest of the story.Īnd as we journey with her through the story of her body, we also discover the story of her mind. Because if there’s one thing we know of Roxane Gay, it’s that she can create some of the most devastating stories, told in the most gorgeous ways. She has always been a writer, and in the years leading up to An Untamed State, Ayiti, and Dangerous Women, writing fiction has helped her take the words she could not say aloud and express them on paper. This is not to say that she has Mary Sued herself into every story that she has written, but she has taken her own experience and used her writing to express the hurt, anger, frustration, horror, and a million other words running through her mind and body. “I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to me, so I wrote the same story a thousand different ways. It was soothing to give voice to what I could not say out loud.