Roxane Gay

Whether Roxane Gay is writing fiction or essays and memoir, it often seems as if there’s no territory she can’t make her own, turning her sharp insight and wry humor from feminism and gender politics and sex to literary criticism and television and movies and other points of pop culture.  The title of her acclaimed, bestselling essay collection, Bad Feminist, started as a joke for her — but soon became something of a badge of honor, and a touchstone for a generation of readers. In her work she uses candor to pull into the light of day a familiar but often repressed jumble of desires, insecurities, anxieties, fears, and feelings — the messy stuff of life that some might prefer to shove in a box under the bed.  She joined Miwa Messer on the podcast to talk about what drove her to write her first book-length memoir, Hunger.