But I think we like to believe that recovery means we can get over everything and that we can forgive those who have trespassed against us. 'Especially for Miri, in the novel, recovery is just getting to a place where she wants to be alive, and feels alive, and can be present in her life. 'No, I don't think it's a fiction, but I think we have a fictionalized understanding of what recovery means,' she says. In the novel, Miri's story gets turned into a TV movie, which she watches over and over again, comforted to see her trauma being 'neatly endured and resolved.' 'We have a really stylized understanding of trauma in popular culture,' Gay says, 'where something bad happens and the person has a period of mourning or coping and then they get better.' In Miri's life, there is only 'the before' and 'the after,' and the after doesn't offer easy redemption, but nightmares, cold sweats and alienation from the people who love her. How?Īn Untamed State is remarkable for a trauma book, in that it shows that the recovery is almost as difficult as the trauma itself. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Do I poke the wounds even more, try to draw more blood, extract even more raw personal truths? Do I ask her limp questions about her writing schedule (which I know about anyway, since she has explained it on her blog)?Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title An Untamed State Author Roxane Gay She has written with exacting honesty about nearly everything I could ask her about. There's something about the bareness, the unabashed need that oozes out of her words (because that's how we treat need: as if it's seeping and possibly infectious) that makes me feel exposed just reading them, like she's giving up our secrets, us humans with our sadness and weird toes and fear of being alone.

In every sentence, she's there: exposed, doubtful, present.Īnd Roxane Gay makes me nervous. Gay never obscures her authorial self, never pretends that her writings were birthed immaculately, handed down whole from the mount whence cultural judgments are dispensed. Gay - novelist, essayist and relentless documenter of her own life - proclaims her I-ness everywhere she goes: On her blog, she describes what she ate for dinner, what made her mad on an airplane, what she's afraid of, what she's ashamed of, what makes her lonely.Įverything is about her - and that's how it should be. 'I do not care for epigraphs.' 'I was not impressed.' Roxane Gay's new collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is littered with defiant, regal I's. Her essay collection Bad Feminist will be released later this year.

Roxane Gay's new novel is An Untamed State.

An untamed state