It was about my body and the things that happened to my body, both in terms of trauma and weight gain. It wasn’t really a memoir of my writing career or my childhood. I kept reminding myself that this was a memoir about my body, so it wasn’t a memoir of my entire life. What sort of things did you hone in on in terms of developing the particular narrative for this memoir? You said you decided what the narrative needed. That also helped me make a decision about what to write about and what not to write about. And also, I thought a lot about necessity and what does the narrative need and what would be gratuitous. I want to respect their boundaries and make sure the things that are sacred to me about my relationships stay sacred. I was really thinking a lot about the people in my life first and foremost. I am allowed to save parts of my life for myself.” That helped quite a lot to recognize, “OK, I am writing a memoir, but I don’t need to give the reader everything. I stuck to my boundaries when push came to shove. I just realized at some point, I really can’t put this off anymore unless I just want to cancel the book, so I just started writing and gritting my teeth and making sure I stuck to my boundaries.
How did you overcome the fear or hesitation in sharing your vulnerability for a memoir? But Difficult Women was always going to come out in January 2017. June 2016 came around and I was like, well, it’s not gonna happen. The book became delayed because I just dragged my feet and procrastinated and procrastinated and didn’t write the book. I was actually very resistant to it for a long time. I never really planned on writing memoir. Why was it scary to write this particular memoir about your life? You’ve described the writing process for Hunger as very scary or difficult. It was originally anticipated last year and Difficult Women came out instead earlier this year. Here, Gay discusses the difficulty of in finally writing Hunger, why her new memoir is not a story of triumph, making herself vulnerable to the public and why she doesn’t believe her literary honesty makes her brave. Gay says she didn’t begin to truly confront her past until she was in her thirties. In order to survive, we fit ourselves into the world because the world rarely sees or adapts to survivors.īut gaining weight and developing a difficult relationship to food never truly addressed the underlying trauma. Reclaiming one’s own body, in whatever way that may manifest, is a response to the initial and the reoccurring trauma of assault. Sexual assault is not about sex, but about power. This desire to regain control of one’s own limbs after a traumatic incident. I also thought boys don’t like fat girls.” “I definitely thought, if I’m bigger, I’ll be safer because I’ll be able to fight those boys better. For Gay, trauma manifested in a deliberate manipulation and transformation of her own body into a size she once believed would deter the lasciviousness of predatory young men.