“I knew exactly what I was doing,” says Gay, who teaches English at Purdue University in Indiana and has also written a novel and two short-story collections. Instead, she began to stuff herself with food. She told no one of the brutal attack-not even her doting Haitian parents. When Gay was 12 years old, she was led into the woods by her boyfriend, then raped by him and a dozen of his friends.
(Jay Grabiec)Įmbedded in a dark corner of the collective psyche is writer Roxane Gay’s horrific account of sexual assault, detailed in her essay “What We Hunger For.” The piece is included in Gay’s bestselling Bad Feminist (2014), which turned the popular critic into a cultural icon.
Author Roxane Gay in Coleman hall on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois on January 31, 2014.
