What a force Roxanne Gay is. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about the idea of a public intellectual. We were arguing that it feels like maybe the concepts passed its prime. It's a phrase, It conjures up an idea of a certain structural privilege. It's kind of intensely gendered. Self appointed public intellectuals, we decided were overwhelming their particular type of old white man. Most self respecting women would be anywhere between disdainful and
actively mortified at being described that way. But the more we thought about it, the more we came up with exceptions to that idea, and one name that we agreed upon an indisputable public intellectual for our time, is Roxanne Gay. Her books are terrific. The novels and graphic novels, yes, but her non fiction is an absolute game changer. Her essay collection Bad Feminist is a modern classic. Her memoir Hunger makes you think about bodies and how we move
through the world. But it's work outside those books that makes Roxane Gey such an invaluable contributor to the public sphere. Roxanne is someone whose endorsement on a book makes me pick it up back when X was Twitter and Twitter was good. She was one of those voices who enlivened the debate with her incisive contributions and ready wit. She teaches,
she mentors. She has her own literary imprint, and when her byline appears in a publication, when there's a new opinion piece by Roxanne Gay, it's never less than essential. Reading Her latest book, Opinions, gathers together Roxanne's best non fiction pieces from the past ten years, and it's an exhilarating reminder of why she is such an inimitable talent.
Ahead of Roxanne's visit to Australia this month, I wanted to find out what it means to look back on what she refers to so brilliantly in her subtitle as a decade of arguments, criticism and minding other people's business. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them.
Roxanne has written extensively about growing up in the world of books, about how becoming a writer seemed destined even from the younger stage, even though as the daughter of Haitian immigrants, she first aspired to be a doctor. You were a very keen reader from a very young age. I understand, to the point where your parents armed you with your own typewriter for your writing and taking you to the library every weekend. What are those earliest reading memories for you?
You know, I read a lot growing up, and my earliest memories were just like the odd that I could go to this building where there were so many books and I could just take whatever I wanted and go back. I mean, it was amazing, it was just amazing. And my biggest memories of reading are that I was reading way above my pay grade. My parents just assumed that if it was in a book, it was good, so they didn't monitor my reading or censorate, and so I read a lot of very adult stuff at a very
young age. And like one of the main books I remember reading was Clan of the Cave bear yep by gene Al, and it's this sort of epic prehistoric novel but also lots and lots of sex, And I had no idea what I was reading, but I did know that sex was something that happened on a bear pelt.
And nothing in life has taught you otherwise. That's true.
I mean, as far as I know that remains the case, and you know I keep my bare pelts with me at all times. But it was just amazing to be able to have such a rich imagination and a rich imaginary life because my parents fostered my love of reading and never tried to change that love.
Now, as you're reading, as you're writing changed. Do you still push yourself to read stuff that is outside your comfort zone or have you reached a point where you lean into reading what you.
Know you like to read both? Actually, I do push myself to read outside my comfort zone because I have found some of the most amazing books that way. I remember several years ago I read this book called The Water Knife by Paolo Bauchi Galoopi, and I loved it.
It was completely out of my wheelhouse, and like to this day, I remember that book like with clarity, and I loved that I had taken the chance on the book even though I knew nothing about it, knew nothing about the author, and actually prefer to know nothing about the author or what the book is about. I just want to dive in and be surprised. So I do
like to read outside my comfort zone. But there are also things that I love like I love to read a spy thrillers and like stories and conspiracies in Washington, d c. CIA type novels like give me that, and so when I need comfort, that's exactly the kind of thing that I read, and I just love it. It's like, yes,
give me more of this. Tell me what's happening. If there's like a husband and wife and like one of them, like the wife is the head of the CIA and the husband's an operative and they're like estranged.
Yes, yeah, perfect. I think it's good to now ask sweight spot the things.
That absolutely and like. It's called comfort reading for a reason. I mean, I think it's important to challenge ourselves intellectually and to read different things. But I also think there's a time and place for comfort reading and for finding something that's reliable that you know is going to just like feel like home.
You read for comfort? Do you write for comfort or do you write for challenge?
I used to write for comfort, and I would like to get back to it. And right now it's not that I'm writing for child engines, that I'm writing to deadlines and to promise writing into solicited writing. So I enjoy writing still, but it's you know, it's just a little more challenging, and it feels like I'm doing all of this writing that I'm obligated to write. I'm very much interested in it, but it's not like just writing with no audience in mind, where there's nothing at stake.
I'm just writing for myself and maybe something comes of it, but maybe nothing does, and that's okay either way. So I hopefully will be able to get back to that someday.
One of the things thinking about the task of kind of gathering ten years of opinion writing that struck me was not just about whether the wider culture has changed in that time, but your position, Roxanne within it. People feel, and I'm amongst them, a very strong connection with you because of what you write. They have a strong idea of who Roxanne Gay is and your name means something to them. Has that changed what it is to write opinion that kind of rusted on readership.
That's a great question. Yes it has, and I'm not thrilled about that. In that I tend to write primarily for myself, but more importantly, I want to write what I really want to write. I want to write what I think is true and what I genuinely believe, and I want to do so without sort of censoring myself, without anticipating criticism, without wondering what readers are going to think.
And as you develop more of an audience, you know, and because we have so many ways of interacting with people who are putting their work into the public sphere, you tend to be exposed to quite a lot of criticism, and not all of it is well intended, not all of it is useful, and there comes a time where I just feel like I don't need any more feedback.
And I have found that it has affected my writing process a great deal, and I'm trying to write my way out of it right now and to think less about what people might think, even when they like me, because I appreciate that, and I will always appreciate that. It's incredible. As a writer, you never expect that you're going to find an audience, and so that I do have an audience is something I will never take for granted,
and I'm grateful for it every single day. But I then start to think, I don't want to disappoint you.
I don't want to challenge your understanding of me by showing you more of who I am, And unfortunately, people tend to think they know you because they read your work and you've shared some personal details and you know something of me, absolutely, but you know what I want you to know, and I'm actually a very private person, So you know, maintaining some of those boundaries is also challenging, so that people understand, like, yes, you know me, but you know a part of me that I've chosen to
put on the page, and I've put it on the page because I feel like it's going to support the argument I'm making. No, there's no other reason for it. So you know, it's challenging to navigate all of that.
That must be so hard, that kind of parasocial relationship that kicks in, you know, particularly amongst the many modes in which you write and have written, But it seems to me memoir in particular and a kind of Internet writing that you did for some time, and your presence on social media, those two things create the illusion of a kind of heightened transparency. They create an illusion of
closeness between the reader and you. And because a lot of what you've written about in some of those spaces is about trauma and is about sharing ideas, around trauma. The things people project onto you must be pretty exhausting thing to navigate.
It can be. Now I understand where that sort of parasocial connection comes from, especially when people have connected with Hunger, which is a memoir about my body and about living in this world in a fat body. And one of the things I've learned with touring this book for the past seven years is that everyone has some kind of struggle with their body, no matter what size, no matter what level of ability, and that has been very eye opening and humbling, and so I understand the connections that
people feel. And also because the book engages with trauma, a lot of people are carrying around a lot of pain and a lot of trauma, and so I do try to create space for that as I interact with readers.
But it's also challenging because you know, I wrote about my assault, but it was like thirty eight years ago now, and that doesn't mean like I'm completely over it, but I'm like, you know, this is something that I have processed in therapy for just about thirty eight years, and I you know, I don't know that I even at this point have anything more to say about it, and so it can be challenging when people offer so much empathy, which I totally receive and embrace and I'm grateful for,
but at the same time, I often have to try and articulate that this happened a very long time ago, and you know, the book isn't just about that, It's about the aftermaths, and the aftermath, of course, has been much longer than one day. And the other challenge is that people love to share their own stories of trauma,
which again I'm honored to receive. But there are certainly days where I think I can only carry my own trauma today because people have told me the most horrific things, like the amount of suffering in this world is staggering, the amount of abuse some people have suffered is just staggering. And my heart goes out to everyone who has to
experience things like this, And thank God for books. Thank God that we have this way of sharing our stories, because for generations, people and mostly women, kept these stories to themselves and had nowhere to put that trauma except sort of back on themselves. And though change can be slow, that is changing, and I'm grateful for that.
I think one of the things I so admire about your opinion writing is that it is never glib. You know, there's a thing that happens. I think it's the kind of tyranny of limited word counts in newspapers and the desire to kind of get that take just so that kind of rounds off the edges or decides, Okay, well we have to deliver this one thing and do it
in a way that is self contained. And I feel like you write opinion pieces like a book writer, Like you write them in a way that opens up the idea rather than definitively closes it off one way or another. And I'm curious about whether there were surprises as you went back through that decade long archive. Were there things you'd written either that you'd forgotten or that you looked at and you're like, oh god, I would do that complet lately differently.
Now.
It's a good question. You know, it's interesting. The word count thing is real. And I thank you for those very kind words, because it's one of the things I struggle the most with. I'm like, I have three thousand words of things to say, and you want me to distill it down to fifteen hundred or twelve hundred or God forbid, sometimes nine hundred and it can be really challenging.
And that's one of the things that I find most jarring when I read a lot of opinion pieces, especially like op eds, you barely see any engagement with the subject matter at hand, because like you're in and out, and nine hundred words is not a lot. And I also believe like we need to trust people and their attention spans. I really believe we can go further and we can go deeper, but I do try to get as much breath and depth as I can, no matter
what my word limit is. As I was going through the essays for this book, I you know, I don't think there's anything I would I do differently, not because I haven't grown or learned, or because I got everything right. But and I say this about bad feminists too, it's that I did the best I could with the information and resources I had available to me at the time
I wrote those essays. I think the thing that surprised me was just how many like book reviews I had written over the years, and things like that I tend to forget, like, yes, I actually do cultural criticism and I'm not terrible at it. And also I noticed, like certain tropes that I fall into, certain like have like own thing, and it's a rhetorical technique. And my PhD is actually in rhetoric and technical communication, so I know
where it comes from. But this like accumulation of listing all of the terrible things and then making a point and then saying like, here's what we need to do now, And when you see it in like ten essays, like in a condensed amount of time, it's just like, girl, let's try something else. And so it was again a lot of humilit happened as I put the collection together because I just realized some of the things you do are very good, but you have a couple little things
you rely on a little too much. And so I've actually been trying to do different things in my essays since I opinions together and just like, let's grow a little here.
It's definitely challenging. It's worse even than hearing your own voice back on type is saying your repeated ticks and retired. For once in my life, could I just list either two or four things rather than insist on doing three every single time?
Absolutely? And I know you know, every time you read a book back you start to see tics like in my novel and Untamed State Mirie, who's the protagonist, she exhales cigarettes smoke so much, and I'm clearly using it as this device to show that she's sad or she's pensive. And when I read through the novel, I was like, my god, she exhales too much. Fortunately, I don't take myself so seriously that I can't laugh at like my texts and quirks, and you know, I just always think,
oh man, that's imprint forever. But then I I'll tell myself I'm going to do better next time.
Self awareness is a curse. I mean, really, there really is the un self aware that you can say many things about them, but they're happy.
I think they really are. I mean they just walk around like life is great.
After the break. Rot Sand shares the changes in her opinion writing over the years and reveals the people she refuses to debate with. See that was a list of two things, not three. We'll be right back. So opinions gathers a decade's worth of your writing, and I want to know, as you were putting it together, how much the business of opinion and writing opinion you think has changed over those ten years.
You know, in some ways the business has not changed, but in other ways it has, in that the media sphere continues to get smaller and smaller, and pay rates are stagnant. People are still being paid today what they were paid ten years ago, if not less, And that's incredibly disheartening. And if you don't already have a portfolio, a career, a name for yourself, it's even more difficult
to break in. And even though there are fewer legitimate media outlets, there are an ever increasing number of ways that people can express their opinions, and so the importance of opinion in some ways is diluted by social media and all of these ways that people can speak into the void.
It's hard not to feel a bit like the ubiquity of opinion has had a corrosive effect on other forms of journalism. Well, the opinion kind of at this point does rules separate.
Yes, and it has contributed to assuming that opinions are facts, but you know, as to saying, ohs, feelings are not facts. Opinions are important. I think we need to be exposed to a range of opinions. But we also need journalism, we need fact checking, We need people to function in reality. And when we legitimize only opinion over factual, researched and rigorous information, you know, we're really saying that we're just going to trust any old thing. And the reason people
prefer that is because it's easier. Few people really want to contend with difficult subject matters and difficult things. They'd rather just go along with someone's opinion. Now, most opinions are fine, they're reasonably good. But when you bring in toxic opinions from toxic people who want to do more harm than good, and people are easily swayed by those voices, you really start to have a problem.
I couldn't write more. And there's also an element of bad faith in it. It seems to me as well. The people who express opinion not because of any kind of authenticity or strength of feeling, but because they know it's going to get a response. They know that it's grist to the mill of entertainment and conflict.
Absolutely, and that's one of the things that frustrates me most. Like, believe what you want to believe, I can well not respect, but I can understand a true believer. We may be diametrically opposed, but if you genuinely believe, at least you
believe something. What really gets under my skin are the people who are only seeking attention by any means necessary, who are seeking power and other forms of cultural validation, because they're going to say the most provocative thing or the most ridiculous thing, and they don't even really believe it, like a Donald Trump or a JD. Vance. Now do I believe they have noxious ideologies, absolutely, but are they true believers of their conservative, supposedly values.
No, they're not.
Trump will talk about God, and I doubt that man has ever stepped foot in a church, and I just can't respect anything along those lines, nor do I take it seriously, even though you can't ignore it, because these are people who are running for president and vice president in the United States.
And there is that element with both of those examples opinion or political position as vaudeville. It's like, Okay, well, this is going to this is one hundred percent going to energize our base, or this is going to make the people we despise angry, and therefore that's where our victory lies.
Absolutely. I mean, it's politics is entertainment, and that's just incredibly frustrating because politics isn't about entertainment. It shouldn't be
about entertainment. It should be about introducing Canada to the people and allowing people to have choices, to be able to decide which candidates will best suit what they want for themselves, their families, their communities, and in many ways, politics has always been a bit of a circus, especially in the United States, but it has become more and more and more ridiculous, and right now it's just incredibly frustrating that this is what we're left with and that
this is seemingly the best that we can do. Yeah, and I just wish that we could do better. And I mean that for people of all political persuasions, for candidates, you know, on both sides of the proverbial aisle, like let's do better.
Part of the kind of narrative around the twenty sixteen election, and part of the kind of collective memory of that, was that one of the things that history seems to remember that Clinton failed at in that election was talking to people who weren't her base, talking to talking to people who were disenfranchised for different reasons, and kind of taking their grievances seriously. It's what JD. Evance made his
name on rising up on those grievances. And I'm interested in that question of talking to people with whom you don't agree. It's something that I know you've put a lot of thought into.
Yeah, I have no problem talking to people I don't agree with. I am always interested in other perspectives and hopefully learning from people with different points of view. Like how else, I mean, nobody should be in an intellectual vacuum or a silo. That said, there are certain viewpoints that I don't need to entertain that I don't have to legitimize, and those are any viewpoints that are grounded in bigotry and that prioritize isolationism, as xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia.
Like I'm not going to sit talk to the racist nextdoor. I don't need to do that. I already know what they think, so nothing is going to be gained. And oftentimes what we do is we ask marginalized people to humanize themselves to people who don't see them as human in the hopes that that will work. If you don't see me as human, there's nothing I can say or do that's going to change your mind, and I shouldn't have to do that work regardless, like that's work you
need to do on your own. And so I'm always interested in debate and discussion and learning, and I do learn quite a lot from talking to people of different intellectual persuasions, but there are also people I find unreachable.
I'm thinking about opinion and the ways in which it's shifted over the past ten years. One of the things that really strikes me is you rate all these things about the kind of diminishment of trust in media and the diminishment of trust in mass hits that once upon a time, you know, a particular publication would carry such authority that everything that they did would be kind of regarded as worthwhile. And I think the biggest shift is a shift to trust in individuals rather than trust in
companies or master heads anymore. How do you feel about the authority you carry now you're no longer an opinion writer as activist from the margins. Now you're opinion writer as establishment. How does that feel?
It feels weird. And I don't think of myself that way. I still feel like I'm writing them from the margins. But I also recognize that I do have an audience and that the audience tends to look to me, not necessarily for guidance, but just you know, where do you stand? And so it feels that there's a lot of responsibility there.
And I don't mind responsibility and I don't mind accountability, but it is challenging in that I know that people tend to often be disappointed when I don't articulate their exact opinion, or when they think I'm being too compromising or too middle of the road, which I don't think of as my writing at all. But you know, like, for example, I do think that Harris is the right candidate right now, and I also think that we need to hear her policies, like really, what do you stand for?
I mean, I know that the team is working on this, and so hopefully soon they will actually put some policy positions on the candidate's website so that we can have a substantive conversation about her as president and not just not Donald Trump. And yeah, you know, I would like to know more about what she intends to do about the war in Gaza and the extraordinary loss of life
and the extraordinary suffering that's happening there. But I feel like we can have those conversations, and I can also say, yes, I'm very enthusiastic about this candidate, and so I know that that's not going to sit well with every But I also know that my job as a writer is not to make people happy. It's to share my point of view and hopefully do so with as much rigor and integrity as possible. And it's not that I'm always right, but it is that I do put care into.
My work as a reader, as a global citizen, as a human being. I'm very grateful for the care that you take, Roxane Gay, and I'm grateful for your time today.
I appreciate it, Michael, Truly, these are great questions.
Roxanne Gay's latest collection of essays, Opinions, is out now. Roxanne is in Australia this month. She'll be appearing at Carriageworks in Sydney as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on the twenty fourth and twenty fifth of August, and she's going to be in Melbourne at Melbourne Town Hall on the twenty seventh of August at an event presented by the Wheeler Center and Now Will Never Festival.
You can go to either of their websites to get tickets before we go a reading recommendation, and it will come as no surprise that episodes have read this are edited to within an inch of their lives. There's a lot of stuff that falls by the wayside that we adore but we just don't have time for. And in this week's chat with Roxanne Gay, we did ask her about her life sentence. We didn't have time to include it in the episode, but her choice came from Tony
Morrison's wonderful novel Jazz. It's a beautiful line, she says, I didn't fall in love, I rose in it, which I think is just exquisite and reminded me once again that there's no one quite like Tony Morrison. If you're looking for a Morrison book to pick up, I'd like to recommend her Selected Essays and Speeches, which is called The Source of Self Regard. It's an absolute beauty. That's it for this week, So if you enjoyed it, don't forget to tell your friends and rate and review us.
It helps a lot. Next week, I'm going to be joined by two times Miles Franklin winner Rodney Hall talking about his latest book, Vortex.
I've always had a suspicion of stories. I think the problem with stories is that they're enchanting things that strip away all the knotty realities and presume of our lives in any way, our sensible successions will cause and effect. My life's being chaotic. It's not like that at all. It's not like a story at all. If I try to find a story in it, it always rings false.
Read This is produced and edited by Clarenes. Original compositions by Salton Fetcho with mixing by Travis Evans. Thanks for listening, See you next week.