and academic roxane gay, has most definitely cut through with her books, which include unflinching testimony on the impact of being raped, on fatness and the meaning of feminism. how scary is this level of self exposure? roxane gay, welcome to hardtalk. stephen, thank you for having me. well, it s a great pleasure to have you here. you ve written with extraordinary candour about your own life. i have. ..and it strikes me that writing about it presumably a solitary occupation is one thing but then, speaking about it in public is quite another. it is, it is. over the years, has the speaking about it become easier? it has. i m actually afraid of public speaking, and that s why i m a writer, and i never anticipated in my career that i would be speaking about anything in public. but the more you do something, the more habituated you get, and it does get easier and, you know, i tend to speak in front of very receptive crowds and so, that also makes it a lot easier, and i stand
you know, like, brave people are actually brave and i m just a writer, and i think it s really important to have just a scale of understanding, like, what courage actually is. you are a writer and you ve written all sorts of books tou ve written fiction and non fiction, you ve written memoir, you ve even contributed to a comic book series. mm hm. ..you do a podcast. i mean, you are very creative and very busy, but it would be fair to say, would it not, that one book, if one wants to understand roxane gay, one book is at the heart of it and that s hunger. would you agree with that? i think either hunger or bad feminist, but i think mostly hunger because it s my most personal book it s my memoir and in it, i write about my life and it s about living in a fat body in a world that is fairly inhospitable to fat bodies. and you will have a fair understanding of who i am and how i came to be the person that i am today.