Writing into the Wound

Understanding trauma, truth,

and language

By Roxane Gay

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Copyright © 2021 by Roxane Gay

All rights reserved

Cover design by Catherine Casalino

ISBN: 9781094400020

First e-book edition: February 2021

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IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, I was a rising junior at Yale University. I had already changed my major twice. I began as a premed student, because I had an elaborate fantasy about becoming an emergency room doctor, fast on my feet, saving lives, engaging in torrid affairs with my fellow doctors, sex in on-call rooms, living a grand life. And then I took introductory biology with a professor who told the hundreds of eager students sitting before him that his class was designed to separate the biology dilettantes from the students who had the potential to become doctors. As the semester progressed, I was slow to make sense of the course material and quick to understand that I was one of the dilettantes he was so eager to dissuade from the medical profession.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I decided I would be an architect. My father is a civil engineer, so I hoped that an understanding of structures was part of my genetic inheritance. I loved my architecture classes. I loved building models and imagining what structures could be. In an urban planning class, I learned about how a city is designed and the importance of green space. In the studio, late at night, I would cut cork sheets with my X-Acto knife, and sometimes my hands. I had good ideas, but I struggled with physics, the laws of gravity, and designing structures that could realistically exist.

I worked part-time in a computer lab in the cross-campus underground library. I loved technical theater and spent an inordinate amount of time on drama productions, designing and building sets, running soundboards, doing whatever needed to be done to make a show come alive from behind the scenes. Finally, at the end of my sophomore year, I settled on English. I loved reading and I loved writing, so surely studying reading and writing would be a natural fit. I moved with a roommate into an apartment off-campus above a small grocery store. I monopolized the phone line and used a modem to navigate the early internet, which is to say I spent a lot of time talking to strange men about sex. I pretended to be anyone but myself, hoping I could lose myself in the virtual world. I wanted to lose myself because I was losing my mind. I was breaking beneath the pressure of trying to be the good daughter and the perfect student when I was so desperately far from perfect. I was carrying a secret and using food to fill an ever-expanding void inside myself. And then, a few weeks before the semester began, I disappeared.

In the ensuing years, my life has changed radically, and so has the world. As I write this, we are in the midst of an intense and seemingly unceasing collective trauma. Donald Trump’s reign as president and the grandest disgrace in American history is just behind us. The world has been ravaged by a pandemic that is particularly out of control in the United States. We have a new president, but a record number of people are going hungry as unemployment rises, along with the number of families falling into poverty. There are housing crises and debt crises. The wealthy grow wealthier. The erasure of the middle class proceeds apace. The environment is at a fragile precipice as hurricanes batter the South and the East and wildfires burn, unstoppable, across the West. The fractures between people with opposing viewpoints continue to deepen and expand. As a writer, my job is to make sense of the state of the world; I hardly know where to begin.

WHEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, I was gang-raped by a group of boys in an abandoned cabin in the woods. It’s not an interesting story. I am, frankly, exhausted with the story. It’s just my truth. It is a horrifyingly common experience, one with which far too many women and some men are familiar. But regardless, I was raped and I didn’t tell anyone for years, even though it was painfully clear that something was wrong. In an instant, I became a stranger to everyone who knew me. I became a stranger to myself. I had no idea how to explain who I was becoming. I had no idea how to keep myself from shattering, so I did. I shattered, but my skin hid all the broken shards of who I had been. It was easy to hide in plain sight.

I’ve been writing since I was four years old. My early stories were sweet, gentle. I simply loved being able to make and remake the world, limited only by the boundaries of my imagination. And then my writing changed. As a teenager, I wrote countless short stories about terrible things that happened to girls. The stories were melodramatic and overwrought and dark and graphic. I couldn’t tell anyone what happened to me, but in an indirect way I was telling everyone. I was screaming it.

Sometimes those screams were deafening. During my senior year of high school, two friends and I wrote and produced a play about sexual violence. I don’t remember much about the play, but I know when my parents saw a performance, they were confounded. They wanted to know how I could come up with something so dark and unfortunate. I was presented with an ideal opportunity to unburden myself, but still I said nothing.

I finally decided to write directly and openly about my sexual assault, how it changed me, how that assault has haunted me for more than thirty years, with my memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. In previous work, I discussed the assault cursorily. I wrote around it. In part, I was protecting myself. I could admit this thing had happened to me, but I was not ready to share the details. I had kept those details largely to myself for nearly three decades. Enough time had passed that I wasn’t even sure the details mattered anymore. I’ve never forgotten what happened. I remember that terrible day with excruciating clarity. But I also did not trust my memory. I told myself it wasn’t as bad as I thought, even though it was. In truth, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to hurt myself in the way I would have to hurt myself to detail what happened and how and what it felt like to be in my body as my body was callously taken apart.

I wrote around my trauma because it was the only thing I could do. I did not yet know how to make myself be heard. Sometimes this decision to write around rather than into my trauma frustrated readers. In my essay collection Bad Feminist, the essay “What We Hunger For” was the most explicit thing I had, until then, written about what I endured. A reviewer said she threw the book across the room when she realized I was not going to go into any detail about the rape itself. I was furious when I read the review—furious at the reviewer’s unwarranted entitlement, furious at myself for opening myself to the entitlement of others, furious that I had this terrible story to tell.

I knew what I wanted to say, but I was at a loss for how to say what I wanted to say. Every time I sat down to work on the book, my mind went blank. I had no idea of where or how to begin. Deadlines came and went. The book’s original publication date came and went. I pushed the release back a year. Still, I could not find the right words. And then, when I was staring down yet another delay of the book’s release, I started writing, fumbling blindly as I tried to write about a profound trauma and how it had shaped and reshaped me. I tried to write about what it means to live in a fat body, which was, in its own way, another trauma. And I tried to do all this while living in the very body, living with the very trauma, I was writing about. Eventually, I did write a book. I worked with my editor and revised the book. I tried to prepare for having that book out in the world, in the hands of people, some of whom would be generous and kind in receiving my story, and some of whom would not.

My best friend helped me come up with the worst headlines and questions we could imagine journalists coming up with. If I could anticipate the inevitable bullshit, she concluded, I would be better prepared for it. In a way, she was right. I knew there would be prurient questions about my body, my eating habits, my inability or unwillingness to lose weight. I knew I needed to thicken my skin to withstand it. I did not know if I could.

My memoir was eventually released and, despite my best efforts, I was not at all prepared for how exposed I would feel to have bared the most intimate parts of myself. I was more vulnerable than I had ever been, and I was the architect of that vulnerability. I only had myself to blame. And then I went on tour and was interviewed by a number of journalists who were more interested in what they viewed as a salacious story. The bullshit I anticipated was more pronounced than I could have ever imagined. Journalists were particularly fixated on my highest weight, a number I disclosed in Hunger, and though it pains me to admit it, I felt incredible shame each time they said the number with a tone that was … not kind, that was prurient and laced with disgust. I smiled and nodded and gritted my teeth and still pretended everything was fine.

I HAVE BEEN WRITING for many years. My parents have understood that my work is more than a hobby for about six or seven years. They’ve always taken me seriously as a writer, but my career became real to them only when there were tangible milestones they could understand—my book in Barnes & Noble, an appearance on The Daily Show, an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. When I got the call to appear on Fresh Air, I don’t know that I’ve ever agreed to anything faster. My dad listens to NPR all the time, loves Fresh Air. The interview was going to be a pinnacle moment. I was going to make him so proud. I went to a studio in Minneapolis, several hours before an event that evening. I sat nervously, hoping I could sound intelligent, well informed, witty. Terry Gross was in a studio in Philadelphia, I think. And from the moment we began talking, I understood that our conversation was going to be a disaster.

What ended up on the radio was fine, thanks to good editing, I guess. But early in the interview, Gross asked, “How would you describe your body?” I knew what she was trying to get me to say, that she was trying to elicit an excited utterance of self-loathing. I was absolutely unwilling to debase myself, not even for someone I had, until then, greatly admired. I said, “I’m tall.” That did not satisfy her. She pressed further, asking, “How else would you describe yourself?” I said, “I’m very tall.” She fixated on my highest weight. She was deeply curious about my eating habits, about how I could spend so many years being so fat. In retrospect, I understand that her questions, her awkwardness, her inability to understand my body or humanity were more a reflection on her than on me, but still, it was a disappointment, another in a long line of publicity-related disappointments that began on another continent.

Australia is not my favorite country. Each time I visit, I meet lovely people. I see lovely things. I take the stage at sold-out events in Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide. The fans there are warm and friendly and thoughtful and engaged. I meet incredible writers I admire. The first time I went, I brought my parents with me, because they love to travel, too. The flight was interminable. You think you can handle a long flight after a trip to Europe, but then you fly to the other side of the world and realize that seven or eight hours in the air is for amateurs. There is a point during a long-haul flight when you stare out the window into the inky dark of night over the vast ocean and think, I will never escape this place. This is where I live now. And then you look at the monitor and see that there are still ten hours left in the air. It is only then that you can understand hopelessness of a trivial nature.

My Australian publisher arranged for a car and driver for us throughout the trip. Our driver, Michael, was the consummate professional, while also being kind and charming. He took us on a tour of Sydney and we saw all the highlights—the Opera House, Bondi Beach, Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. My publicist, Christine, made everything seamless and was so funny and interesting and before long we were fast friends and still are.

When I returned to Australia two years later, just before the publication of Hunger, I had every reason to believe I was going to have another grand adventure down under. And then I met Mia Freedman, an Australian writer and media personality, who created the website Mamamia—an unholy union of a women’s magazine, gossip blog, self-help community, and parenting forum. I visited the Mamamia office to appear on Freedman’s podcast and assumed everything was fine. We had, I thought, a good conversation. We discussed my work, previous and forthcoming. We talked about politics and culture. We finished the interview, and my publicist and I headed to the next stop.

The podcast was released a couple of months later, the day before Hunger’s release, in fact. Freedman wrote a description of the show that was one of the most humiliating things I have ever seen in print about myself. She wrote, “A lot of planning has to go into a visit from bestselling author Roxane Gay. Will she fit into the office lift? How many steps will she have to take to get to the interview? Is there a comfortable chair that will accommodate her six-foot-three, ‘super-morbidly obese’ frame?” She shared correspondences she had with my publisher, correspondences I had never sanctioned or even known about, that were equally problematic. And she said that discussing my personal business was totally fine because, she believed, it was all part of the story.

I was stunned. Blindsided. Mia Freedman and I had gotten on so well, or so I thought. She had seen me when I appeared in Sydney in 2015, so she knew damn well I was perfectly capable of walking. And I was baffled by what she meant when she said a lot of planning was required given that I only ever ask for two things at my public appearances—a sturdy chair with wide or no arms and a bottle of water. Before long, every major newspaper in Australia, the UK, and the United States had picked up the story. I spent most of Hunger’s release day going from one media event to the next and fielding inquiries from journalists, but not about the book I had bled onto the page word by word. They wanted to talk about Mia Freedman, her fatphobia, and her thoughtless cruelty. I should have been enjoying the biggest moment of my career. The book was being well received. Sales were brisk. I was going to appear on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, who is kind, intelligent, thoughtful, and the only journalist who treated me and my work with respect and dignity. But everything was poisoned.

Again, the choices Freedman made were more a reflection on her than on me, but I had to live with the pain of the experience. I had to live with the scrutiny of my body, which went well beyond my book. I had to live with knowing I had, in a sense, brought all this on myself by writing the book, by living in a fat body, by building that fat body to cope with my trauma. Freedman received a lot of criticism for her framing of my body and our interview. She took the description down. After resisting, she did eventually apologize, though it was clear she had no idea what she was apologizing for. The apology was hollow. The damage was done. I had to live with it all, while trying to hold my head high, at least in public. There were so many news articles, some simply relaying information, some being supportive and taking Freedman to task, some taking me to task, decrying the early strains of “cancel culture,” questioning whether Freedman had, in fact, done anything wrong. There was so much noise, and no escaping it.

In private, I was a mess. I deeply regretted writing the book, I regretted my entire career, I regretted every decision I had ever made that brought me to a place where I willingly put myself in such a vulnerable position. I was angry at every journalist who revealed themselves with inane or offensive questions, who could not wrap their minds around fatness as a response to trauma, who could not see fatness as anything but a moral failing and societal blight, who could not engage with my work with any modicum of intelligence. I worried I was being too sensitive, and maybe I was, but I was still entitled to my feelings.

The truth was that I had written about my trauma. I had exposed myself. But I was not at all prepared for what happened next. I am not sure I had even fully considered what could happen next. I never considered that writing about trauma and publishing writing about trauma are two very different things.

Having Hunger out in the world wasn’t all bad. Readers responded to my memoir in all kinds of overwhelming ways, mostly good. They told me about their own experiences with sexual assault, with the trials of living in an all-too-human, unruly body. They spoke with voices shaking or through tears or so fast they nearly ran out of breath. A man told me about his wife, who had died days before we met after refusing to go to doctors for years because she knew, as a fat woman, she wouldn’t get the medical care she deserved. A nine-year-old boy said my words gave him courage. A very thin woman told me she could relate to everything I wrote, that she had once been a girl in the woods, too. I looked her up and down, the narrow line of her body, and I judged her. I am not proud of that, but I did. I had, or have, a chip on my shoulder, the kind that leads me to believe that anyone living in a thin body is necessarily living a perfect life.

I began to realize that whether I wanted it or not, I had a responsibility not only to myself, but to my readers who, in response to my trusting them with so much intimacy, asked me to trust them with their own intimacies. I realized that when writing about trauma, you have to be prepared to handle not only your own trauma but being exposed to the trauma of others.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER leaving Yale, I returned. This time I was a visiting associate professor on a presidential fellowship. I was invited to teach a seminar of my choosing and give a couple of public lectures. Once I wrapped my mind around the impossibility—or perhaps improbability—of the situation, I decided to teach a workshop on writing trauma. I wanted to build on everything I learned in writing Hunger and putting that kind of writing out into the world.

When I left Yale, I never imagined returning. I didn’t want to return. I mostly hated my time there, for many reasons unrelated to the university but also a few reasons absolutely related to the university. Being Black in the Ivy League is a gauntlet of micro- and macro-aggressions. I was regularly stopped by city or campus police, interrogated about what I was doing exiting the library or crossing the Quad late at night. I was shy and awkward and unfocused. I didn’t know what to study or what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had a rich imaginary life on the early internet, because I found the drab grayness of New Haven unbearable. I was supposed to be happy at Yale, and I was supposed to be grateful to be there, but I wasn’t. I was too broken to appreciate anything about my life.

I took a couple of years off when I walked away from college the first time around. I worked odd jobs, mostly for minimum wage. I continued talking to strangers on the internet, tying up the phone line for hours as I dialed in to message boards with a modem and an Apple LC II. Eventually I understood that if I wanted to have any kind of career, I was probably going to need a college degree. I could have returned to Yale, but I didn’t. I requested to have my status reinstated, and that request was approved, but I could not bring myself to go back. I did not want to step back into the life I had obliterated when I dropped out. There was nothing but bad memories waiting for me and an overwhelming sense of disappointment in myself. I felt like a failure. I was so fragile I couldn’t hack the place once, so why try again? I had been handed the opportunity of a lifetime, and I blew it. Or, I suppose, that’s what it looked like from the outside looking in.

I ended up finishing my degree in a brief residency undergraduate program, in a partnership through Norwich University and Vermont College before it became a for-profit university. And then I got a master’s degree at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and got a job at the university and went through a breakup and decided to mend my heart by moving to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, sight unseen, to get a Ph.D. at Michigan Technological University. People started taking my writing as seriously as I’ve always taken it, and I wrote relentlessly and studied and read and got a job and taught and tried to make a life for myself. I tried to make myself into someone who could enjoy that life.

Clearly, I returned to New Haven under vastly different circumstances. I was a writer of some repute, with five books and two anthologies to my name. People called me Dr. Gay. There were other accolades. I had just bought my first home, without any help from anyone. I was in an unexpected relationship with a woman in New York City, a woman who walks fast and talks fast and doesn’t take any shit and would, the following year, become my wife. When the fellowship opportunity arose, I was torn between the pride of having succeeded enough to go back to a place where once I struggled and the absolute dread of spending time among old ghosts.

And then my pride won out. And, I suppose, part of me was curious about what it would feel like to return to campus as a faculty member. Maybe, I thought, I could have a Pretty Woman moment with some imaginary foe from yesteryear where I could stare them down from my classroom and say, tightly, “Big mistake. Huge. I have to teach now. Goodbye.” I would teach in person every other Monday and teach online every other week. Thankfully, I would not have to actually live in New Haven. I would have done just about anything to avoid living in New Haven, but fortunately it never came to that.

THERE IS NO SHORTAGE of writing about trauma. Nearly everyone has experienced trauma, and there is, clearly, something cathartic about writing about and reckoning with these experiences, these truths. There can be solace in unburdening. There can be solace in saying, “This is what happened to me. This is how I have been shaped by what happened to me. This is who I am because of or despite what happened to me.” But in writing about trauma, I started to think about how to do that writing, and how to do it well.

When you’re finally ready to write about trauma, there is a temptation to offer up your testimony, to transcribe all the brutal details as if that is the whole of the work that needs to be done. There is a temptation to indulge not so much in writing but in confession. Sometimes suffering becomes more bearable when you can share the whole truth of it.

Not all writing about trauma is created equal. As with most subjects, writers can be careless with trauma. They can be solipsistic. They can write concerned only with what they need to say and not with what an audience might need to hear. They assume that their trauma, in and of itself, is the only story they need to tell, or that having experienced trauma is inherently interesting. Or trauma serves as pornography—a way of titillating the reader, a lazy way of creating narrative tension, as if it is only through suffering that we have a story to tell. We see trauma as it unfolds but are rarely given a broader understanding of that trauma or its aftermath.

I have a confession. I get so tired of the word trauma. It is so clinical, so desperately inadequate. It is such a specific word, but it could mean anything. It could be the aftermath of sexual violence or domestic violence or emotional abuse or the trauma that rises out of bigotry or the trauma of medical catastrophe or the trauma of enduring a natural disaster or the trauma of fighting in or living through a war or the trauma of grief or the trauma of school shootings and other community violence. There is acute trauma, repetitive trauma, complex trauma, developmental trauma, vicarious trauma, and historical or intergenerational trauma. Trauma shapes all our lives, in so many ways. We are walking wounds, but I am not sure any of us know quite how to talk about it.

As I reflected on the experience of writing Hunger and having the book in the world, in the hands of tens of thousands of strangers, subjected to the judgment of tens of thousands of strangers, I started to think about writing trauma as a discipline. I’ve been teaching writing for the past fifteen years, and the workshops I like best are those where I frame the semester with a specific area of inquiry—writing love and sex, writing across difference, writing the novel, writing the political novel. Sometimes students resent what they see as creative constraint, but there is valuable work to be done when purpose is delimited by specificity. In each of these workshops, I ask an overarching question that will, hopefully, guide our work for the rest of the semester.

Though I teach both graduate and undergraduate creative writing, I have a fondness for working with undergraduate students. They are more earnest. They know they don’t know everything, but still have charming confidence. They are willing to take risks. They are willing to learn. They are willing to challenge as much as they are challenged. Every class, every student meeting, is an adventure. And so, upon my grand return, I decided to teach a workshop on writing trauma, with a focus on not only why to write about trauma but also how to go about it in the most ethical and effective ways.

In designing the course, I had far more questions than answers. How do we write trauma? How do we convey the realities of trauma and its aftermath without being exploitative? How do we write trauma without traumatizing the reader? How do we write trauma without re-traumatizing ourselves when we write from personal experience? How do we write trauma without cannibalizing ourselves? How do we write about the traumatic experiences of others without transgressing their boundaries or privacy? How do we tell stories of trauma without allowing the trauma to become the whole of our narratives? What does it even mean to write trauma? These are questions I have long grappled with in my own writing. I hoped that there was fruitful work in trying to grapple with them with a group of undergraduate students.

There was a lot of demand for the class, so students had to apply. Several of the applicants were graduate psychology students, therapists in training who hoped the workshop would give them insight into how they could better work with clients dealing with trauma. I admired the initiative, but the workshop was never intended for practitioners, and in fact one of my primary objectives was to remind students that they were, ultimately, writing for an audience, not using the work solely as a therapeutic means of processing traumatic experiences. Knowing who the class should be for, I spent weeks considering more than 150 applications, trying to find the right students for the course.

I wasn’t looking for perfect students or perfect writers. I was looking for people who were intelligent and curious, interested in challenging and being challenged, and who might have good chemistry with the rest of the class. Nearly everyone who applied would have been a welcome addition, but alas, there could only be fifteen students. The group I ended up with were remarkable, interesting as people, intelligent, witty. I had forgotten how Type A students at Yale tend to be. When I assigned homework, they did all of it. They always had a lot to say during class. They were respectful of one another and the subject matter. They came to office hours and wanted to make appointments a week in advance to ensure they would have the time they needed. It all made for an invigorating experience.

I taught my class on Monday nights and held office hours at my hotel, in the empty restaurant, during the afternoon. Each week, I would leave Manhattan around 11 Monday morning and get to New Haven a couple of hours later. The first week, as I pulled off the highway and slowly rolled through the city, I marveled at how little the place had changed over two and a half decades. Atticus Bookstore, a café where I spent hours on end studying or reading or eating twee salads, was still there. The brutalist architecture of the campus buildings hulked ominously. There were more Black and Brown faces as I walked around, but the same disparities as always were playing out all around me. I thought I might feel something momentous that first day. I was prepared to feel something momentous. But it was just a normal first day of school. I took a final look at my syllabus. I checked out my campus office and met a few other faculty members. When I got my ID, I did finally feel something, but it was indescribable. I was holding an ID indicating my faculty status. In a box somewhere in my home office back in California was my undergraduate student ID, and there was a vast, rocky terrain between those two things. It was mostly surreal, walking across the Quad and past Old Campus, where all freshmen live. The libraries were exactly where I left them. The more things change, as the saying goes, the more they stay the same.

PUBLIC SPEAKING FILLS ME with anxiety, even now that I’ve become experienced with sharing my work, my life, for an hour or two with a large audience. I can make it seem like being onstage is effortless, but inside, I am silently screaming, deeply uncomfortable with so many eyes on me, worried I will say or do the wrong thing. I feel a similar anxiety in the classroom, the students looking at me like some kind of authority figure, expecting me to be the adult in the room.

That first night back at Yale, I turned onto a narrow street to get to my classroom in Harkness Hall. I distinctly remembered wandering around trying to find my way at seventeen years old, armed only with a paper map and an inability to ask for directions. I was nauseous then and I was nauseous now. The radiator clanked loudly as I walked into the building. It smelled musty now as it did then. Bulletin boards were plastered with notices for all kinds of progressive student organizations and an apartment for rent and a used laptop for sale and an upcoming concert. Students milled about waiting for their classes to start. I walked slowly, studying the room numbers until I found my classroom. Most of the students were already there, and I was fifteen minutes early. They looked at me expectantly and I took a deep breath and thus our class began.

I’m a big believer in the importance of reading as a writer—examining texts not for meaning but to understand how writers elicit the responses and reactions readers have to their work. To better understand the range of strategies they could use to write about trauma, I gave my students a heavy reading list. I made a digital reader, with essays on the language of trauma, how to write memoir, ways of writing about violence, the use of humor to process trauma for an audience, writing about the trauma of others, writing about collective traumas, and how to conduct research when writing about trauma. I also assigned novels and memoirs like Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker, Heart Berries, by Terese Marie Mailhot, Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison, The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, Heavy, by Kiese Laymon, and Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Developing that reading list was one of the most exciting and humbling parts of thinking through the workshop. There is a whole lot of brilliant writing in this world. And the writers who write about trauma well do so exceptionally well.

In each of the books, the writer left me in awe. They took ugly experiences and made them beautiful. They wrote things that were uncomfortable and provocative and unbearably human. They demonstrated that there is no singular way to write about trauma, and that sometimes to write about trauma did not require excavating intimate details. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch wrote a memoir about her life with an abusive father. The nature of the abuse, the severity of it—these things are clear, but she offers not one explicit detail. When I first read the memoir, I admired that restraint, that dignified discretion, that ability to protect herself while still telling the whole of her story, on her terms. She did not start at the beginning and end at the end. Instead, she started with the stillbirth of her daughter, because “events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.”

Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, is a novel about a South African professor, David Lurie, who is forced to leave his job in disgrace after having an affair with a student. He heads to the Eastern Cape to see his somewhat estranged daughter, Lucy. They try to reconnect as he rebuilds his life or hides from his life and avoids facing himself. Lurie is a deeply unlikable character, a flawed narrator with a questionable moral code. In that, he may be the perfect person through whose eyes we see this story. And then something terrible happens to both David and Lucy, and they deal with that trauma in very different ways. The novel is an elegant examination of post-apartheid South Africa, one that reveals how sometimes the sins of the father and the sins of a country are brought to bear on the people who least deserve to pay an unbearable price.

Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot’s debut memoir, is a fiercely poetic book about growing up on the Seabird Island First Nation, in British Columbia. It’s a story of survival and poverty and oppression and mental illness and what it means to be an Indian girl, an Indian woman. So much of the book is brutal, but Mailhot tells her story so beautifully that the brutality becomes just bearable enough. I don’t know that there is another novel I talk about as much as Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. It is one of the books that has most profoundly influenced my work. The novel, a quasi sequel to The Color Purple, is a condemnation of female genital mutilation through the story of Tashi, a young African woman who is caught between two worlds and struggling to reconcile with what was done to her body and what has been taken from her.

Kiese Laymon writes about fatness and trauma and family legacies and addiction in his memoir Heavy. He is relentless in his self-examination, in telling not only his story but the story of the Black South, of mothers and sons, of young boys being taken advantage of, often in ways few people will acknowledge, of the ways predominantly white institutions fail anyone who is not white. Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is a classic, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl, Bone, and the abuse she suffers at the hands of her stepfather, Glen, how she tries to hold on to herself and how, ultimately, she saves herself. The language is unforgettable. The story is unforgettable. Bone is as compelling a protagonist as there has ever been. In the afterword, Allison writes, “That was what my book was about—telling a story that made sense of what did not make sense, and telling it plainly enough that anyone who wanted to could point to it and say ‘that’s my story.’”

Each of these books is a master class on the many different ways a writer can tell the truth, and write beautifully about ugly experiences, and confront the complex realities of living in this world, whether it’s in a woman’s body or a Black man’s body or a poor girl’s body. Reading can be such a personal experience. What I took from these books was not going to be what my students took from them, but as we discussed them, I hoped they would see at least some of the instruction I found in the books. I hoped they would understand why I was having them read these books. If I could impart to my students—to anyone who wants to write about trauma, really—one thing, it would be to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, to create a space within a narrative for both the writer and the reader to see themselves, to understand something necessary about themselves.

TEACHING A WRITING WORKSHOP about trauma ended up being one of the most fulfilling experiences of my academic career. The students surprised me in the best ways. They were so deeply engaged with the subject matter. They were rigorous in their writing, and in the analysis and critique of one another’s work, but they were also generous in holding space for the difficult topics and complex intimacies they were writing about. I still marvel about the work my students produced over the course of fourteen weeks. There was so much trust in the group. From one week to the next, the students made themselves vulnerable. They created boundaries for themselves and maintained those boundaries. They came to understand that they had to make room for the reader, even when writing about deeply personal experiences. They did everything I asked of them and more. When they faced the blank page in the privacy of their own lives, they had to ask themselves why they wanted to write about trauma and come up with a good answer, one that reflected an understanding that writing to purge oneself of an experience was never going to be enough to do that writing well. They had to confront shame and heartbreak and disgust and humiliation and rage. They had to confront injustice, cruelty, and unfairness.

By the end of the semester, I would like to think, the students had a solid understanding of how to think and write about trauma. I know our work together certainly helped me in my own thinking about how I approach it. I came to understand more intimately that writing trauma isn’t only about a trauma. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the trauma itself. And it was not lost on me that I was teaching these students about the very thing that had driven me from New Haven so long ago. I did not know if I would ever find the words to write about the strangeness of it all.

WHEN I TEACH WRITING, I am offering best practices and best guesses. What works for one writer may not work for another. There are, perhaps, rules for writing, but the rules are only as applicable as a writer wants them to be. For every rule, there are several good reasons to break that rule.

This is why it can be so challenging to write about trauma well—there is this terrible, painful thing that happened to either you or someone else or a family or an entire group of people, and you want to shape that experience with words. You want to convey the depth of the terrible, but you don’t want to do it so artfully that the trauma is minimized or overlooked. Writing is about choices. Each week, I asked my students what choices they wanted to make about the language they used, and about how they could test the limits of language. I asked them to think about the level of explicitness with which they would describe trauma, how to write about the traumas of others without co-opting those stories, how to write about trauma with depth and nuance, how to avoid creating work in which there were only victims and villains instead of flawed people who hurt and were hurt.

I began the semester thinking I would go from week to week examining different ways of writing about trauma, that I could meticulously plan out my syllabus and everything would proceed accordingly. I am not sure why I labored under this delusion. I had my plan, but each week, as we discussed the readings, as we workshopped stories and essays, I saw what had also been true when I was a student. The ivy climbing up so many of the campus buildings could not protect the people living and studying in those buildings from the reality of the world beyond.

Students in creative writing classes always disclose personal narratives. I certainly did in my early writing workshops in high school and college. For so many people, creative writing classes are the first opportunity you have to share the secrets you have long kept to yourself, but you have the safety, particularly in fiction workshops, of deflecting the truth, of saying you’re making it all up, writing about someone else’s story. Students write stories about alcoholic parents and sexual assaults and abusive boyfriends and body dysmorphia and self-loathing and loneliness. They write about their fears and their hopes and, intentionally or not, they always reveal some of the most private parts of themselves. During one of my first semesters of teaching, nearly every young woman in my Introduction to Fiction workshop wrote a “story” about a terrible and/or abusive boyfriend. It was so intense that at the beginning of one class I had to say, “Ladies, you all need to dump your boyfriends, immediately.” We all laughed, until we didn’t.

The stories my students at Yale shared were even more personal than those I had seen in previous workshops, because the students were intentionally writing toward the class’s objective, whether they were writing about themselves or something beyond themselves.

I tend to compartmentalize. My professional life exists in one compartment and my personal life in another. My compartments have compartments. Over the years, I have worked hard to make sure that the walls of those compartments stay impermeable. Or I have allowed myself to believe those walls are impermeable even when they clearly aren’t. When you return to a university you once ran away from, the walls of those compartments start to fall down.

The plan was to teach on Mondays, spend the night, and return to Manhattan on Tuesdays. That first night, after teaching, and speaking with the students who lingered after class, I returned to my hotel. I ate dinner alone in the hotel restaurant, just as it was about to close, and drank a gin and tonic to smooth myself out. I went up to my room and tried to work, sitting at the narrow desk, staring into the kitchen of a communal house of some kind. I watched television, even though nothing registered. I FaceTimed with my girlfriend, who tried her hardest to get me to open up about what it felt like being back in New Haven. I said I was fine, which is what I always say when anyone tries to get me to open up. My writing is the only place where I am open with my feelings. Around two in the morning, I could hardly keep my eyes open any longer. I fought sleep valiantly until I surrendered to it. My dreams that night were terrible, hovering at the edge of nightmares. That was one of only two nights I spent in New Haven during that semester, and it was the only night I spent alone. Two weeks later, I started going back to Manhattan after class. I would get home near midnight, sometimes later, completely wrung out. But I would fall asleep next to someone who loved me, and would never leave me alone with old ghosts.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO WRITE about personal trauma, but it is also difficult to write about collective trauma, the trauma of oppression or poverty or authoritarianism or pandemic. When I write about collective trauma, I am trying to make sense of the world we’re living in, even though the world so rarely makes sense. Sometimes, in writing about collective trauma, everything seems terribly hopeless. The things we are up against, the things the most vulnerable people are up against, are immovable, intractable. Writing about them feels futile. It feels unreal. It is sometimes painful. It is sometimes numbing.

But my responsibility is to write beyond my personal feelings. My responsibility is to tell a story that will inform people or get them to give a damn. Over the past several years, I have been in a position of writing about collective trauma far more than I would like to. At the same time, it is something of a relief. I am so tired of writing about my own trauma. I am bored with it. Though I am still dealing with the repercussions, I have nothing left to say on the subject. At least that’s what I tell myself.

So I look outward. I look at everything happening in the world, and think, I have to say something. And then I start to think I have nothing left to say on those subjects, either. I tell myself I want to write about something different, but then another school shooting happens or another police officer murders an unarmed Black person or a reality show host is elected president and millions of women are forced to confront the true virulence of misogyny while millions of people of color are forced to confront the true virulence of racism. How can I stay silent in the face of these calamities? How can I look away? How dare I look away?

IN 2020, A PANDEMIC raged across the world, and that rage was particularly ferocious in the United States. In a matter of days, we had to rethink the politics of proximity. The world became starkly divided between that which is essential and that which is inessential. As a writer, I have been forced to confront how profoundly inessential my work is. This is not self-deprecation. This is self-awareness. During the early weeks of the pandemic, there was not enough personal protective equipment for anyone, let alone the people who needed it most—doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals, grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, teachers. My then fiancée and now wife and I began isolating in March, and we have mostly been in our house since then. She is a professor and department chair at the School of Visual Arts, and in a matter of weeks she had to transition her undergraduate classes and graduate program online while also seeing to the needs of all the students and faculty. As a writer and public speaker who was constantly touring, I found myself forced into stillness. After more than six years of constant travel, there was nowhere to go. My hectic calendar suddenly emptied. I was not needed anywhere. It was a glorious feeling. It was a terrifying feeling. I had no idea where, if at all, I could fit into what the world was becoming. Almost a year later, I still don’t know.

But as a writer, I see how the collective trauma of living through a pandemic while an indifferent president and his administration allowed us to die magnified with each passing day. Millions of people have been infected with COVID-19. There were no coherent guidelines for how we should live or how we should be. As the school year commenced, every K–12 school district had a different plan. Every university had a different plan. Most of those plans were woefully inadequate and predicated on getting back to a normal that was well out of reach. Most children haven’t seen other children in months. They still have no idea what’s going on. Parents are trying to hold it all together while working from home. Or, if they can’t work from home, they have to go out into the world each day and return, wondering if they’ve been infected and if they will bring danger back into their home. Single people haven’t been able to experience any kind of physical affection. Older people, who are particularly vulnerable to COVID, have been isolated from their friends and family, and the people in nursing homes have, in far too many instances, been left to die as the pandemic sweeps through, without mercy.

We’re all trying to survive, I know that for sure. We talk to our nieces and nephews and siblings on the phone and via FaceTime. We talk to my parents via FaceTime because my mom has stage IV lung cancer and it’s not safe for us to be around her. When my wife and I leave the house, we make sure we have masks and backup masks and wipes and gloves and hand sanitizer. We mask and glove up before we go into the grocery store or at the gas station to fill up the car. When we get back in the car, we wipe down our phones and the car surfaces before we take off our gloves, and then we sanitize our hands and then we take our masks off. Like airport security, this is mostly ceremonial. We read enough to know surface transmission is negligible. All this sanitizing and abundance of caution is a way of asserting a small measure of control. It’s a way of believing we can do something, anything, to survive this plague, this collective trauma.

After the first couple months of isolation, my wife and I started entertaining with friends in small groups. I got the idea after I saw our next-door neighbors with their friends, everyone sitting on the driveway, six feet apart, in their lawn chairs. I’m something of a loner, but even I had reached my limit.

When we eloped, we had a small party, and I do mean small–eight of us. I cooked, and we used disposable everything and four couples sat together, six feet apart, outside, pulling our masks up and down to eat and drink. A few weeks later, we had more friends over and we did the same thing. It was far from normal, but it was something—to laugh, to commiserate, to have a glass of wine around the firepit. It made me wonder, as I do every day, how long we will live like this. It has been months, and it could be many months more, and it could be years.

I AM A WRITER. I am in a unique position to write about the way we live now, a phrase that has been repeated to the point of nullity. But I don’t always know what to do with this position. I don’t know what to say that hasn’t been said before. I don’t know how to say something that can rise to the moment. I don’t know what to say when so much is unknown.

Like many progressives, I was staggered by Donald Trump’s election. I knew his presidency would be a disaster, and I have quite a vivid imagination, so I thought I could imagine the worst of what he might be capable of. I was not nearly imaginative enough. In four years, he dismantled decency and decorum, checks and balances, dignity, and most social and political norms. He pushed a horrifying, hate-filled agenda through with little resistance. He put a craven and indifferent billionaire in charge of the Department of Education. His cronies were given powerful positions for which they are aggressively unqualified. He reshaped the courts for a generation at least. The United States Postal Service was on the verge of collapsing. Congress was embroiled in self-interested political maneuvering. Trump diminished America’s global standing and made us a mockery. World leaders did not bother hiding their disdain for him, and their honesty about his incompetence provided at least a glimmer of hope. And all this happened before the pandemic.

The rank indifference Trump and his administration demonstrated toward the American people is breathtaking. Some 25 million people have been infected and more than 400,000 have died. The very basic things people should do to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe have become politicized. Surviving the plague has, inexplicably, become a matter of survival of the fittest. Because Black and Brown people are disproportionately affected by the pandemic, the Trump administration didn’t need to care. They willfully looked the other way because they could. Joe Biden won the presidential election, and even as Trump’s tenure as president came to a violent, pathetic end, he openly tried to steal the presidency he believed was rightfully his because of vanity and hubris. I wish I were being hyperbolic, but I am simply detailing what America has been through in the past four years as plainly as I know how. The atrocities of the Trump administration are so excessive that there is no easy way to convey the extent of the rot. I keep reaching for words and feeling like I will always fall short.

Nothing is safe. Nowhere is safe. It all feels kind of apocalyptic, and that’s for people who are relatively well off. For the poor and the working class, for the essential workers and the people on the front lines of the pandemic, the crisis has been magnified. The economy is struggling along, begging for a stimulus that has been shamefully slow in coming. A housing crisis is looming. A debt crisis is looming. A student loan debt crisis is looming. A healthcare crisis is already upon us. A climate crisis is looming.

This is a terrible story. This is a profoundly traumatic story. Forgive me: I hate telling this story. And still, it needs to be told. To change the world, we need to face what has become of it. To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.

On May 25 of 2020, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit bill, and Chauvin decided to be the judge, jury, and executioner. As is often the case these days, there is video of this corruption of due process. I try not to watch videos of the desecration of Black life anymore. I have seen too many. We have all seen too many. But for some reason, I decided to watch what happened to George Floyd, to bear witness. It was the least I could do.

For almost nine minutes, Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck. He stared directly into the camera, because he knew he could get away with murder. He knew he would be supported because he was being supported by the three other police officers who stood by and did nothing to stop him. George Floyd begged for his life in front of witnesses, and the civilians among those witnesses did try to get Chauvin to stop. And when they were ignored, they were reminded of how power works in law enforcement. Their pleas and George Floyd’s pleas for mercy did not matter. He was forty-six years old, one year older than I was at the time. He had a lot of life left to live and it was stolen from him. The video of George Floyd’s murder told a story about America from 1619 until today.

We have seen the fragility of Black life in all kinds of videos and images. We have endured a collective trauma that seems to be unending. But there has always been visual evidence of this fragility. When her son was murdered, Mamie Till asked for her son Emmett Till’s casket to remain open. “I want the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said. The haunting image of that boy’s body told a story. From the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, there were lynching postcards, which were, which are, exactly what they sound like—postcards featuring pictures of the dead bodies of Black people who were victims of lynching. The strangest fruit. These postcards told a story, a condemnation. The image of Michael Brown’s body, left in the street for hours, told a story. The video of Rayshard Brooks being murdered by police told a story. There are too many names to list, or, in truth, the recitation of these names yet again is too painful. What matters is that we know their stories. We have seen their stories. For those of us who are Black, we know that their stories could easily become our stories or the stories of our friends, our family, our neighbors.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, protests began not only across the United States but around the world. The familiar story of the fragility of Black life had finally reached enough people, had finally been told with such casual brutality, that the only possible response was to take to the streets, despite a raging pandemic, to say “Enough.” To shout, “Black lives matter!” To demand accountability, to demand change.

Hope has never been my ministry, mostly because I am more a realist than an optimist. But something is happening. The world as we knew it has broken wide open. There is a before and an after, and the world will never again be what it once was. That sounds terrifying, but it is an opportunity. I have never seen anything like the protests we have seen this past year. I have never seen such a broad coalition of people recognizing what is at stake. People are stepping outside of their comfort and complacency because they recognize the urgency of this moment.

George Floyd’s death told a story, and, I think, that story was too familiar. Enough of us recognized that it is time to change the story we keep telling over and over. We are having serious conversations about defunding the police and prison abolition. We are having serious conversations about universal basic income and erasing student loan debt. We are having serious conversations about universal healthcare. We are opening our eyes to the grotesque inequalities that arise from a handful of people hoarding the majority of the world’s wealth.

On August 23, 2020, Jacob Blake, twenty-nine years old, was shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was unarmed and trying to break up a fight. He is a father, a fiancé. He has survived but is partially paralyzed. There is, of course, a video, but I could not bring myself to watch it. There are other ways to bear witness than subjecting yourself to the sight of a cruel disregard for the humanity of Black people. There is never a day when Black people can breathe easy, let their shoulders down, close their eyes, and feel safe.

Collective trauma is unending. There is no respite from it. And for marginalized groups, there is the vulnerability of compounded collective traumas. It is that reality that shapes how I think and how I write. So many of us are shaped by collective trauma and our personal traumas. And some of us try to share our stories. We try to find the right words. We try to be truthful and fair to ourselves, to others. We try to be free. There is no pleasure to be had in writing about trauma. It requires opening a wound, looking into the bloody gape of it, and cleaning it out, one word at a time. Only then might it be possible for that wound to heal.

About the Author

Photograph by Reginald Cunningham

Roxane Gay is the author of several bestselling books, including Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the essay collection Bad Feminist, the novel An Untamed State, the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti, and the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness. She is also the author of World of Wakanda, for Marvel, and the editor of Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has just launched the Audacious Book Club and a newsletter, The Audacity.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

About the Author

About Scribd