In 2017, the popular website, Medium, approached Gay to start a pop-up magazine for the online publishing platform. In addition to editing Not That Bad, another project of Gay’s which was really impactful was Gay Magazine. I know every woman I know, including myself, can relate to at least one experience in the book and that is what makes it more powerful and incredibly necessary in today’s world. This valuable and revealing anthology, edited with an introduction by Gay, had me in tears the entire time I was reading it and weighed heavy on my heart. Not That Bad is a collection of essays by various authors gathered by Gay that addresses what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression we face and routinely have our experiences invalidated when we speak out. In 2018, Gay released one of my favorite projects, which is another book to add to her battle in spreading awareness about and destigmatizing sexual assault, Not That Bad. The book covers a lot of hard topics and if you want to know more about it and her process of writing it, I recommend listening to or reading the highlights of her interview with NPR which really shows why Hunger needed to be written. For Gay, the book is a confession, and “having that kind of vulnerability in the hands of strangers really scared me,” she admits. Ultimately, Gay traces her relationship with her weight back to being a victim of sexual assault as a child. This book is not about wanting to lose a few pounds but instead, “is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight,” explains Gay. Gay knew that as soon as she realized she would “never wanted to write about fatness” she needed to. This book is also known as the book “she wanted to write the least”. In 2017, Gay published her memoir about her body titled Hunger. This is something I as a queer black woman can relate to and I believe Bad Feminist really highlights these ideas. But she supports feminism’s aims, wants equal opportunities for men and women, reproductive freedom and affordable healthcare for all, so she came up with the label Bad Feminist, which punctures the need for perfection. She also worried that feminism didn’t allow for natural human messiness. A 2014 article from the Guardian perfectly explains Gay’s ideology and thought’s that led her to identify as a ‘bad feminist’ saying:įor years she felt that as a black woman – particularly one who has, at times, identified as queer – feminism wasn’t for her, because the movement “has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others”.
The essays in Bad Feminist were originally published in the American Prospect and various websites such as Salon, Jezebel, and the Rumpus. In Bad Feminist, Gay’s essays explore being a feminist while loving things that seem to be at odds with the feminist ideology such as liking the color pink. The second book Gay released in 2014, which she is most known for, is her collection of essays, Bad Feminist. Additionally, An Untamed State is often viewed as a fairy tale because of its structure and style, especially in reference to the opening sentence, which begins with “once upon a time”. The novel explores the interconnected themes of race, privilege, sexual violence, family, and the immigrant experience. Her husband fights for her release over thirteen days and the novel also highlights Mirelle’s struggle to deal with the traumatic experience in its aftermath. First, she published her debut novel, An Untamed State, which follows Mirelle Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American woman who has been kidnapped for ransom which her father refused to pay. In 2011, Gay published a short-story collection, Ayiti, an exploration of the Haitian diaspora experience, which immediately highlighted her raw writing talent that makes her “one of the voices of our age” according to the Canadian National Post.