Before the pandemic, Roxane Gay was constantly on the road. When the lockdowns of early 2020 came into effect, she realised something startling. “That was the longest I had been in one place since 2014.”
She and her now wife, the writer and designer Debbie Millman, had just decided to live together between LA and New York when the pandemic hit. But Gay’s mother has stage 4 lung cancer, and “you know, lung cancer and Covid don’t go well together”, Gay says. So they formed a pod, or bubble. “I was like, ‘I’m not going a year without seeing my parents when we don’t know how much longer she has.’ But she’s a marvel. Turns out she’s got a lot more time.” Her smile as she says this is sweet, almost private. “It was great to be able to keep our eyes on them. It was fun to hang out. I like my parents. They’re just funny. And they’re amazing people to live with as adults.”
Meanwhile, amid the horror of a global catastrophe, Gay and Millman eked out quality time together. They got a puppy, played badminton and went on neighbourhood bike rides. Later that summer, Gay revealed the pair had eloped. “I didn’t get much writing done, but I did enjoy the step back,” she says.
The “step back” comes after more than a decade of near-constant stepping forward. Gay, 48, is a multi-hyphenate: novelist, essayist, short story writer, professor, editor, comic book creator, reviewer, podcast host, critic and commentator, and before its recent reinvention, tweeter. Today we’re meeting to talk about a new collection of her nonfiction writing from the last 10 years. The book, split into seven sections, is pertly called Opinions. But its wordier subtitle, “A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business” tells the real story of the breadth of what interests Gay. And if you’ve been paying attention this past decade, you’ll know it is vast.
Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to strict but supportive Haitian immigrant parents who encouraged curiosity and excellence in Roxane and her two younger brothers. The event that shattered her childhood was written about in a stark and stunning 2010 essay, What We Hunger For: an unforgettable account of her rape at 12 by a boy she thought was her boyfriend, and his friends. The essay was republished in her barnstorming anthology Bad Feminist, in 2014, the same year as her debut novel, An Untamed State. Both were greeted with triumphant fanfare, and she began writing columns for the Guardian US and the New York Times.
In 2017, she published a short story collection, Difficult Women, and Hunger, a memoir of her body. The following year, she edited an anthology on rape culture, Not That Bad. Gay’s thoughts on everything from Charlie Hebdo to Donald Trump, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo, from school shootings to the Fast & Furious franchise, regularly beam out to millions of readers across the world. She may not be the voice in your head. But she’s likely to be one of them.
“I think our primary responsibility is to be honest,” Gay says, of her role as an opinion writer. “I think if you have to manipulate to make an argument, then your argument isn’t sound and you need to start over.” Just as important is to have an actual opinion.
“You look at our political class, they don’t say anything about anything,” she says. “They all just sit in the middle of the road. And they try not to offend anyone. Or in the case of Trump, they just don’t give a fuck and break everything. When you have a political class that’s accustomed to saying nothing and doing nothing, the least we can do as opinion writers is have conviction and express that conviction as honestly and as powerfully as possible.”
The first and second sections of her new book, Opinions, focus on identity politics and Black lives, particularly in the US. The central question they ask is: how many times can the social contract be violated before the damage is irreparable? It is an eerie experience to read the names of the dead – Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, Alton B Sterling, Jordan Neely – compacted by time into a few consecutive pages. How does Gay see the state of American racism?
“The American attitude right now is, ‘Oh, we’re still talking about this?’ And I think you can see that as evidenced by the recent supreme court decision to essentially ban affirmative action.” This limits the power of universities to consider an applicant’s race in admissions, but Gay offers a prediction on that: “The thing is that in about two years, we’re gonna see a lot of sad white women. We’re gonna see a lot of tears. And like, who did you think affirmative action was helping? Because I teach, I work in higher education, at least for one more year. And when you look around, it’s not us who are the majority of the people on these campuses. So how did y’all think you were getting in?” Several reports over the years have suggested that white women have been the major beneficiary of affirmative action, from higher education to workplace outcomes. As for racism writ large, the prognosis is dire. “We have lost a lot of ground.”
Identity and how it shapes culture and policy remains a source of interest for Gay. She is herself at the intersection of a few inflection points in the US currently: race, gender, sexual orientation. She is also an author whose books have been banned in three states. “People use the phrase ‘identity politics’ as a cudgel,” she says. “As a way of saying, ‘don’t make me uncomfortable. Don’t make me have to confront history. Let’s not belabour that point.’ And honestly, that’s so tiresome. It’s weak. And I think it’s important to call that out often and loudly.
“I think a lot of people, from frankly all walks of life, want to be free from identity. They want to live in a sort of identity vacuum where [they think], ‘I can be seen and understood and respected for me.’” She shakes her head. “It’s so sad that people think that, because you are you because of all of the various things that make you who you are. We are not robots. And frankly, even robots have personalities, because people programme them.” She muses on the cause of this disconnection. “I think it’s oftentimes that people worry that their identity is the thing that is standing in the way of their being seen and heard.”
Being seen and heard is at least one mainstay of the internet, for ill and for good. It’s given Gay incredible reach, which means her work finds its way into corners she herself might not venture into. Does she still feel pressure to get it “right”?
“The older I get, and I think the more experienced I become, the more I recognise that as opinion writers and cultural critics, we are awful certain,” she says with a short laugh. “We live in a very uncertain world. And unfortunately, sometimes we are writing into a readership that craves certainty. And so there’s less generosity of reading. The reality is, in this kind of work, you’re never going to be perfect. And I’m learning to develop a tolerance for that.”
She has an easier time letting go of the bad faith readers these days. “There are people who want to ‘continue the discussion’. They’re the ‘debate me!’ boys. And the thing is, I did my work on the page. A lot of times people struggle to hear that.” She laughs. “They just want attention. These are like, lonely people. And I have empathy for that. I understand loneliness, but I don’t know that I can fix that for you.”
With research suggesting that a proportion of Americans believe violence is the only way to achieve certain political goals, does Gay worry about anger spilling offline? She has grown used to extra security at some of her events, she says. And when she’s teaching, “I just try to be cautious and responsible. These days you never know when an angry man with a gun is going to stroll on to campus. So I just try to be safe as often as I can.”
Her opinions, she states baldly in the introduction to the book, have not changed. “I have been accused, often, of being a centrist, which I don’t think is terribly inaccurate,” she says carefully. “But what I’ve been trying to do is really listen and look at why the centre is so comfortable. I’m trying to move further left because that’s the only way that we’re really gonna achieve change. And I’ve been trying to educate myself about, for example, prison abolition.” Gay is referring to the movement in the US to abolish prisons in favour of restorative justice, in which harm is reduced and prevented by addressing people’s needs.
“Prison conditions in this country are horrific. And we’re seemingly fine with that. It’s not enough to say that we need prison reform. You cannot reform the carceral system. I know that people believe that compromise happens in the middle, but we’re not looking for compromise at this point. I think we’re looking for freedom, for liberation, and that doesn’t happen necessarily with compromise.”
She extols the intellectual heft of the activist and writer Mariame Kaba on this issue, just one of the people whose writing she finds insightful and important. “[Kaba] is very good at meeting people where they’re at. I think she’s brilliant.”
She speaks similarly highly of her former Hear to Slay podcast co-host, writer Tressie McMillan Cottom, and of the “phenomenal” culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald. Other voices she admires include Palestinian author Randa Jarrar (“She never wavers in her convictions. And it comes at quite a cost for her because she’s Palestinian and she dares to voice rage about the ways in which her people are suffering”). There’s also Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose novel Manhunt Gay calls “mind-blowing”. Most of her books are in LA but she tells me what she’s been reading on her Kindle lately: the forthcoming The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez, about the construction of the Panama Canal.
Unsurprisingly, Gay is interested in all kinds of culture, across media, from microtrends on TikTok to the reality TV show Shark Tank. I ask her opinion of the online discourse around using Ozempic and other similair drugs for diabetes type 2 for weight loss, bearing in mind her own weight-loss surgery in 2018, months after Hunger was published. “It’s ridiculous,” she says flatly. She finds much of the criticism mean and petty and ignorant. “And you probably don’t even know what Ozempic is. You’ve just heard the word, you’ve heard weight loss, and now this is a parlour game for you. And I think that the casual way that we play parlour games with each other in our lives and the bodies that we live in is sad, in some ways. Weight loss is hard no matter how you get there. Truly. It’s this ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ – you should lose weight, you should be thinner. Oh, but not like that.” She scoffs. “Please.”
The final section in Opinions is titled “Solicited Advice”, collected from her “Ask Roxane” column in the New York Times. Gay finds advice-giving pleasurable – “It’s that feeling of having an outside perspective and feeling like other people’s problems are more manageable than my own” – and does so on the understanding that it is likely to go unheeded. “Oftentimes advice is more about the advice-giver than the person who’s receiving it,” she says. What advice would she give her younger self?
“I think my primary advice is that we cannot afford to be nihilistic and throw our hands up and say everything is hopeless,” she says. “I think that nihilism is as futile as hope. We can be clear-eyed and we can lament the state of the world, but we cannot give up, because I do think that there’s a lot of joy to be had. I think that we do have a future, even though climate change is here.”
In the book’s introduction, Gay writes: “I did the best I could with the knowledge and skill I had at the time. And I continue to write that way.”
“Historically voices like ours have never been given access to [a] broad audience,” she says. “I don’t presume to think that I am important, but I do think that the more of us that articulate our understanding of the world and our interpretation of the world, the better. And we may not find a lot of people that are interested in listening to us. But I do think we find some people and I find that that’s enough when it’s the right people,” she concludes.
“We don’t have to agree. But it would be great if you just listened.”
• Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism and Minding Other People’s Business by Roxane Gay is published by Corsair. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• Join her for a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 24 October, when she will be in conversation with Nosheen Iqbal. Book tickets here
