People make comments or say insensitive things about her weight. She sometimes has trouble getting through doors. Gay cannot fit into hospital gowns, clothes found in most stores, feminine clothes she cannot stand for long, climb stairs, or walk long distances. I personally know at least one person who has created such a outsize fortress, and then there’s Oprah, who was also molested as a child.Įach episodic chapter, written in unremarkable sentences without attention to a narrative arc, outlines a separate area of suffering. Gay’s case protective reaction has been to eat herself into an impermeable, outsize fortress, and once you do that, it is hard to go back to the way you were before. Adults may deal with the death of a parent, neglect, foster care, illness or disability, war, forced emigration, poverty, beatings, but perhaps molestation is uniquely harmful. Millions of people know how this works because violation of children is so common. The protective mechanisms - obsessive physical and emotional privacy, a sharp reaction when touched, flashbacks - are not always obvious, and Gay has made us more sensitive to them. Her story interested me because people I know have been similarly transformed by callous manipulation of their bodies when they were children. Roxane Gay was transformed in the worst possible way by a gang rape when she was twelve.
