SPECIAL: Turning Fact into Fiction with Roxane Gay

real news. The show launched with a short story by Roxanne Gay, a story I really loved. It's about life under lockdown because of a pandemic, a lot like what's happening now, but a little more intense. I just thought, what would it be like to live with your partner in isolation for a year. Roxanne Gay is the author of the novel An Untamed State, a best selling collection of essay is called Bad Feminist, and the best selling

memoir Hunger. She's a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and she's a fascinating person who's always at the center of the cultural conversation, often leading it. I wanted to talk to her about her new short story, her work in many different genres and what we can learn when we turn news into fiction. Roxanne, thank you so much for being here. Chronicles of Now is starting with an episode featuring your short story String Theory, which

is an extraordinary story. I wonder if you would begin by just saying a few words about it. It's, of course, never the simplest thing to explain a short story, because that's why you wrote the short story, not to have to explain it. But if there's anything you think would be helpful to a listener who hasn't had a chance to read the story, that would be great. Yes. I wrote it several months ago when we were first hearing news of a pandemic in China and it was starting

to really affect Italy at that point. And my wife had the previous year been to Anchor Vat in Cambodia and a monk gave her this red bracelet, and for some inexplicable reason, it was still on her wrist a year and some change later, and it became this sort of obsession. Every day I would look at this bracelet and just think, like, what kind of mystical powers to

this monk put into this string bracelet? Because there's no reason why it shouldn't have fallen off because she wore it every day, She never took it off, she showered with it, she lived her life with it, and it still hung in there. And so I thought that I would write a story about marking time and dealing with a pandemic and the persistence of this string. In the story. The bracelet does have exactly that kind of mystical staying power that you were just describing. And yet it seems

to be getting under your skin. Your wife is wearing it on her skin, but it's getting under your skin, absolutely, And that's one of the most mysterious and I think fascinating things about the story, at least to me. Why do you think it is getting under your skin? I mean, I know in the story you don't quite tell us, so I don't it's not a spoiler, but I'm wondering if you would just reflect on it a little bit. I have no idea because it's so innocuous. It's just

this red bracelet. It does not interfere with my life. It has actually since fallen off. So what is this thing? And why do I care so much about it? And I still don't really have any answers. But I also think it was a distraction to become fixated on this little bracelet. I mean, it was a way to pass some of the time. It's a very prescient story, given that you wrote it before we in the US were

starting to go under lockdown. It reads as though it had been written by someone who had already been in lockdown for a long time, and that's kind of extraordinary in and of itself. You and she had been to Italy not so long previously, right, we had. We went to Italy last summer and it was a great trip. So, you know, I think because we travel a lot, I was thinking about what would it be like to be forced to stay in one place for a year. Little did I know that we would indeed be forced to

stay in a place for a year or more, who knows. So, you know, I think it was just prescient as the word I had on the show a while back, Andy Strominger, who's a physicist who's often credited as one of the founders of string theory in physics, and so I immediately wondered when I saw the title of your story, which is of course in part about a string, whether you were trying to refer in any way to this nearly mystical, though the physicists don't think of his mystical idea that

the entire universe is constructed out of a series of strings. Was that that must have been somehow in your mind. It was definitely in my mind, not in terms of technical application, but certainly the underlying concepts of string theory were on my mind. There was a clever little intersection there between actual string theory and my theories as to the meaning of this string. Yeah, and when you figure that string theory starts with the idea that everything is

founded in these very, very very tiny spaces. And then there you are in the story, as we are all now locked in our own sometimes very tiny spaces. Yes, it does seem to construct a whole universe out of this space, Yes it does. One of the ideas behind Chronicles of Now as a show is to include fictional stories that in some way interact with the real world

and with the news that people are engage with. You write in literally every genre there is to write in so far as I can tell, memoir, nonfiction, essay, the op ed form, fiction, short and long. As far as I can make out, there is no genre in which you're not comfortable ring. I don't actually know if you've published poetry. Maybe you have as well. I am a very bad poet. I published a couple of poems when I was much younger that were very, very bad. I'm

not it's not my thing. It's not my genre. I love reading poetry, but I am not skilled at writing it, and that's totally fine. We cannot do everything. It's nice to know that you're human. Tell me what when you think about fiction that is in some way an interplay with the real world, What is it that draws you

to sit down and write something fictional? Unto those circumstances when you could write something that was in the form of memoir, or you could write something that was in the form of a commentary or an essay with all those genres at your hands, and it's easy for me. I can't write fiction, so I write my long form narrative. That's all I got. But when you have such a remarkable creative capacity, what goes into your true using which of the genres you're going to write in. It just depends.

I wish that I had a consistent rubric, but I oftentimes it's a matter of urgency, and if something needs to be addressed immediately, I tend to use nonfiction because a there's more of a demand, but also we need help in processing the world that we're living in. That's certainly what I look to other writers for. So I feel that urgency and I write something to respond to the murder of George Floyd or a pandemic or a despot president. It just depends. But with fiction, I have

more time, and there's a different kind of urgency. I might want to respond to the world that we're living in, but differently, and I think I want more creative leeway because you have to work within the bounds of reality when you're writing nonfiction, and you get to create the bounds of reality with as long as you do it carefully. And so it just depends really on what I feel is the best genre for what I want to accomplish.

You mentioned three of the leading preoccupations that we all feel in this time, George Floyd's murder and more broadly, in the Black Lives Matter movement that already existed but that has further developed in reaction to the murder. You mentioned the pandemic, and you mentioned our despotic president in your phrase, does this seem like a stranger than usual time too, in that these three interrelated but distinct phenomena

are kind of looming over us in this way? I mean it feels that way to me a lot of the time, as though it's different from what has come before. But then I try to check myself and say, no, no, no, you know, we had Richard Nixon, you know, and that was itself very bad, And it's not like Black Lives Matter is responding to one murder. It's responding to systemic

racism with hundreds of years of weight behind it. And yes, the pandemic is worse than anything that we've experienced in our lifetimes, but there were pandemics in the past too, And I try to hold myself back from thinking of this is so outlying a time. Do you have an instinctive reaction to whether this does seem like an outlying time to you or whether it's just more of more

concentrated version of what we're accustomed to. I think that every generation thinks that we're experiencing something unprecedented because we're in it and we don't have the distance of history and time to really process and recognize and contextualize the

severity of what we're experiencing. So I think that if you would ask people who were fighting for civil rights in the nineteen sixties if things were our worse now, I suspect they would have the answer of no. And if you had asked people who were seeking freedom when they were enslaved if things are more tumultuous now or then, you know, they would have a different answer. Yeah. But we can only know our own lives and our own realities.

This reality despite the severe tumult that we've seen in history. I mean, things are really fucked up right now. And it's particularly fucked up because throughout history we have relied on checks and balances, and we have expected that at least one branch of the government would do its job. I myself have the instinct that the one check that has done sort of okay. I mean, I feel like

Congress has not done very well. The House of Representatives didnt impeach the president, but wasn't enough to get him removed, so that was not a very effective check. It was something, But I sort of have the feeling that when Trump has directly violated the law as opposed to when he's violated all of our norms of decency, when nothing happens when he's violated the law, the courts have to some

degree checked him. Yes, but it's not enough, and we can't trust the courts because Trump is installing so many conservative judges. And there's actually nothing wrong with being conservative, but the conservatives that he's appointing are They are far more than conservative. They're rapidly conservative and incredibly dangerous to civil liberties and women's bodily autonomy. And so, yes, we can look at some of the pushback the courts have engaged in and continue to hope that they will do so,

but I think it's tenuous at best. I will say that Neil Gorsuch did surprise me with his decision in the LGBTQ Title seven case. Yes, not that he's not genuinely and deeply conservative. He just seemed prepared in that instance to follow his conservative judicial philosophy to a result that the liberals also agreed with. I think everyone was surprised, and I have no doubt that the President was very surprised because his judges are not necessarily voting the way

he would have expected them to, and that's encouraging. We'll see how long it holds out. And I think it's really heartbreaking that so much of the fate of the country lies in the hands of an elderly woman who is very ill and deserves to retire and deserves to convalesce and try and overcome cancer without having to also work a full time job as a Supreme Court justice. I think it's really you know, the Republic should not

come down to this, but here we are. I will say for Justice Kinsbury that she is one tough lady. She is, But I agree that it's not good for the fate of the Republic to rest on the health of one of the justices. No, we'll be right back returning to the fiction side of things. Who are the writers contemporary writers that you find most insightful when you're looking for writers who talk not just about, as you were describing, changing the bounds of imagination, but also on

reflecting on contemporary events through their fiction. Is there anybody that you really like? I mean, I think they do it in ways that are more implicit than explicit. But Yagyas is outstanding and does that I think incredibly well. So does Danielle Evans, who is a short story writer. She also, I think, is working on a novel, so she can do both and does so with real talent. Alexander Chi writes really well to the contemporary moment and

also beyond. His work is beautiful. And so those are three authors that come to mind when you look at the kind of work that you want to do going forward. Do you think of yourself as prime to write more novels, to write more essays, to write more memoir How do you think of your own trajectory as a writer. I'm going to be doing all of the above. I have two novels for its coming, and three nonfiction books and a comic and a movie and a TV show. So I think I just counted six books, one one, two

movies and a TV shows. That write six books, one movie, one TV show. Yeah, and a comic. How do you literally find the time to produce that much content? I have no idea. I don't have children. Do you write every morning? And do you write all day every day? Do you write all night? I'm a night writer. I don't really get much done that's useful in the morning except work on my podcast, and I write generally in

the evenings, and it just depends. Some days all write for seven or eight hours, and some days all write for ten or twenty minutes. Tell me if you wait a little bit about your podcast. I co host a podcast with Trussey McMillan Cottam called Here to Slay. We originally conceived of it as a black feminist daily show, so responding to current events and engaging with the news and significant people from a black feminist perspective, and that's what we do and it's been a lot of fun.

We're now in our second season and for the first thirteen episodes, we're focusing on COVID and how it's affecting people, and we're especially looking at the people who do not normally get attention, So we're looking at how is it affecting sex workers, How is it affecting, for example, drug addicts. What do you do when there's nowhere to go to get what you need. I'm learning a lot and seeing a lot, and it's quite something when you look back on the episodes that you've done so far, what are

the things that you've been most surprised by? I mean curious to know whether it is some theme or trend that you see emerging from those interviews. It's really interesting to see how people are finding a way to survive and to make life in this virtual world work. And it's just interesting to see that people are able to adapt. And the other thing we've noticed that every black woman we've spoken to has said, this is the first time in her life that she's been able to take a break,

and that has been really eye opening. And I think both Trusty and I would agree that we're in the same situation because we have so many jobs, and we work so hard, we support families, you know, we have a lot of responsibilities, so you don't really have that opportunity to rest. And then the world said, nope, you

are going to rest. And so despite the anxieties of the economy and this disease and how it disproportionately is affecting Black people, the black women that we're speaking to are all saying, I am resting for the first time in my life. And you know, that really gave us pause and continues to give us pause. If we end up in a space where we're reopening without a vaccine, which seems like one of the possibilities, what happens to people who are having an opportunity to rest now. I mean,

as they're basically told, sorry, rest time is over. You know, you need to be back in your job, essential job, and you're not going to be able to protect yourself. And that's just the way our capitalist system is set up right now. How do you perceive that people will respond to that, I don't know. I think it's a really good question, and I think it's one that we are going to see the answer two in coming weeks

and months, and so I don't know. I think that there are people who can't afford not to go back, who are going to have to take that risk, and so we're going to continue to see the class divide widen, and we're going to continue to see that we are willing to sacrifice people for our comfort and it's going Thank you very much for your time, Roxane, and thank you for joining me, and congratulations on your podcast and on having your story String Theory inaugurating the Chronicles of Now.

Thank you so much, thank you, I appreciate it. You can listen to Roxanegey's short Story String Theory on the Chronicles of Now podcast, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. I highly recommend it. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with mastering by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell,

Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts. And one last thing. I just wrote a book called The Arab Winter, a Tragedy. I would be delighted if you checked it out. If you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. You can

always let me know what you think on Twitter. My handle is Noah R. Feltman. This is deep background