Roxane Gay: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us’

The writer whose radical honesty has won fans across the globe talks about writing as a cry for help, using books to fight racism and why she rejects ‘identity politics’

There is a story in Roxane Gay’s second collection of short fiction, Difficult Women, in which a big, strong man who works in a quarry goes for a walk on the beach and, seeing an extra glint in the sand, discovers a woman made of glass. He falls in love, marries her, they have a glass child. At meals, he marvels, watching the food travel through their bodies. When he holds her he does so gently, and not just because he must. A quirk of nature – that lightning striking sand can make glass – becomes an inspired vehicle for preoccupations that recur throughout Gay’s work: that love means not being seen through, but seen, and heard for yourself; that bodies are both breakable and a possible source of redemption.

Gay’s stories often take the form of fable although, on her first visit to London, she is quick to reject that as any appeal to universality. “In fact, it’s the opposite,” she says. “As a black woman, as a black queer woman, specificity is incredibly important, because diverse experiences are rarely seen in literature.” She agrees that fairytale “informs all of my fiction work” – there is the woman married to an identical twin whose brother takes turns coming to her bed in the belief she doesn’t notice, or the woman who is also a knife, or the miner so despairing of his life underground that he projects himself into the sun and puts it out – “because in the original fairytales there’s oftentimes a lot of suffering before you get to any kind of resolution or solace”. But details ground the stories, in the rural midwest, for example, or a gated community in Florida, or a strip club in Baltimore. “What we tend to forget is that we all deal with a lot of the same things,” she says. “We all deal with complicated relationships, with children, with the loss of children, with love and suffering. We have a lot in common, and I do think literature allows us to have some sort of shared empathy.”

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SlAYLD