In her smart, clipped, exceedingly direct (and Twitter-friendly: Gay's steady stream of commentary has attracted 205,000-plus followers) style, Gay expresses a mix of innate contrarianism and warts-and-all vulnerability that seems uniquely unconcerned about her own likability or attaining anyone's approval.
But it was not until the publication of her best-selling 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist-in which Gay expounded upon everything from rape culture to the wish fulfillment of Sweet Valley High, building a case that feminism was too obsessed with a certain kind of intellectual perfection-that she became a go-to voice on the ever-roiling front line of gender, race, and politics, and, perhaps most of all, the embodiment of intersectionality. This myth is like heels and purses-pretty but designed to SLOW women down") on her own Tumblr, as well as the feminist sites Jezebel and The Hairpin, and the pop culture site The Rumpus, where she was a founding editor. 1: "Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be toxic, bitchy, or competitive. She's been issuing rants and opinion pieces online for almost a decade, attracting an early Internet following for, say, documenting her unrequited love for her UPS man, or offering instructions on "How to Be Friends with Another Woman" (Rule No. Gay is neither an overnight sensation nor a millennial, but if you know her only by her writing, you might mistake her for both. It is visceral and confrontationally honest, and pretends to resolve nothing in the pursuit of either outer beauty or "inner peace"-and is thus quintessentially Roxane Gay. "Whenever I thought about women doing books about bodies and weight, it was always women who had undergone a fitness journey or a weight-loss journey," Gay says, "and they're at the end of it, standing on the cover in their fat pants, 'Look at me-I'm so thin, I've learned so much.' " Hunger, on the other hand, isn't oversimplified or prescriptive. A Diptyque Baies candle fills the air with the smell of roses.
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.