I make sure to shake her hand-there's a whole chapter in her book about how she's not promiscuous with hugs, which she views as 'an act of profound intimacy'-and we settle into her dark, cozy living room, which is dominated by the largest TV I've ever seen playing a Grey's Anatomy rerun on mute, leather furniture from Restoration Hardware, and stacks of advance copies of books sent by publishers for her review. At 6'3', the 42-year-old has a commanding, vaguely regal presence. When we meet at her apartment in Lafayette, Indiana, where she has been a professor at Purdue University for three years, Gay looms large. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.'
The frustrating thing about cages is that you're trapped but you can see exactly what you want. So in her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper), she strips away all niceties to reveal her most painful truth: 'This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. She is both utterly without shame when it comes to exposing the most raw parts of her psyche and, she says, painfully shy.
Roxane Gay is many things-critic, social media firebrand, college English professor, self-described 'love child' of Beyoncé and Ina Garten, bisexual Haitian American PhD, and romance-novel fan. This article originally appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE.
