Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language

Books

From the bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, an unforgettable, deeply personal look at how trauma has shaped her life and work-and what all of us need to do to come to grips with the collective suffering of the past year. Bestselling author and cultural icon Roxane Gay is no stranger to trauma. As a young girl, she was the victim of a horrifying act of violence that changed her life and would strongly influence her career as a writer. In her 2017 memoir Hunger, she addressed that trauma head-on, writing with bracing honesty about her body and the ways that food can be used both to bury pain and make oneself disappear. The response to Hunger by some critics who seemed to take perverse pleasure in highlighting Gay's vulnerabilities was itself a fresh wound. By exploring trauma publicly, Gay suffered more of it. In her Everand Original Writing into the Wound, Gay not only talks openly about trauma in her personal life-from her fraught time as an undergraduate at Yale to the stress of returning ...