I think I’ll be strong when I can better handle failure.” Why she’S dated so many assholes: There are lots of things that I can do, but…I’m deeply afraid of failure. And I think that might be why I struggle with considering myself strong. Like, calm down, there, sister-are you really strong, or are you just human?…I also think strength is about being able to have self-awareness to acknowledge mistakes and to acknowledge failures. “It’s not fair to myself, but I am consistently raising the bar in terms of even strength and what that looks like….I think it makes me uncomfortable to consider myself strong….because I don’t want to be seen as having airs about myself. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s brave.” she doesn’t consider herself strong: “I find the word brave is ubiquitous these days and overused, like anytime a woman blinks, ‘Oh my God, you’re so brave!’ …I think that sometimes the bar is too low for certain things, and I think sometimes we project bravery onto others when they do things we can’t do ourselves. It’s also how I learned about sex.” She thinks the word “brave” is overused: When I was a child and I was dealing with sexual assault, reading showed me language for what I had been through, and that I wasn’t alone, and that perhaps I would get to the other side of it. And it was fantastic….I completely forgot about the fact that my flight was delayed for two hours….I have also used reading to escape far more serious things. I just could not be bothered to do anything else. “Reading, I find, provides escape, and if it doesn’t provide escape, it provides solace….Yesterday, I had the shittiest travel day known to man, and so I read on the entire flight. So anytime you try and get out of those categories, you start to create problems….In Difficult Women, I was trying to explore, what are the circumstances in which a woman is behaving in a completely rational and normal way and is considered difficult?” Why she loves reading: And that’s really frustrating because we have these very limiting categories into which we like to put women and contain them.
“I think anytime a woman demonstrates any amount of personality, self-actualization, or free will, we’re like, oh, this bitch is fucking difficult. “My fiction is indeed fiction, it is made up, but there’s always a lot of wishful thinking, and ‘I wish I could do this, I wish I could behave in this way, I wish I could say this without consequence.’” Why she wrote Difficult Women: I had no filter.” Her fiction is often wishful thinking: And, it wasn’t bullying or anything like that, but if I had something biting to say, I said it. “Probably my sophomore year or so, I developed a mean streak.
I never really allow myself to enjoy any accolade or rest on my laurels, so to speak….I would like to get to a place where I understand what satisfaction feels like, where I think, okay, I’ve done enough for today, for this week, for this life, but….I’m working on lowering the bar and being comfortable with mediocrity.” “The more successful I get, the less successful I feel…because I keep moving the bar for myself….
One of the reasons I think I work so hard is just thinking, okay, am I finally good enough? Am I finally doing enough to earn my keep in this world?” She struggles to feel successful: “Like any good self-loathing writer, all I want is approval. Please forgive my Very Professional™ “!!!” on this photo I had to share my enthusiasm on Instagram stories and then forgot to take more pictures because this interview was so good. Ellipses represent omissions where quotes have been condensed.) (*Please not that these quotes have been lightly edited to remove verbal fillers.
This discussion was, as would be expected, full of fantastic Roxane Gay quotes on everything from her teenage mean streak to her professional insecurities to what she’s watching on cable these days.
She spoke with podcast host Debbie Millman for a live taping of her show Design Matters, in which Millman interviews artistic people about the design of their lives and careers. Gay’s writing has spanned genres and forms you may know her for her novel ( An Untamed State), her essay collection ( Bad Feminist), her memoir ( Hunger), her short stories ( Ayiti and Difficult Women), her essay anthology on rape culture ( Not That Bad), her Black Panther comic ( Black Panther: World of Wakanda), and/or her incredible clapbacks on Twitter. Roxane Gay was introduced as an author, professor, and “Twitter gangster” at the third annual On Air Fest in Brooklyn.