National Book Festival, Continued

I spent the afternoon at the National Book Festival in the presence of three amazing writers, each with wildly different books, who spoke as if they had met the night before and calibrated their talks to include one specific theme, telling our stories. Women's stories. Black women's stories.

Margot Lee Shetterly is an awe-inspiring speaker. She teaches in Charlottesville, Va., and I admit to envying any student who lands in one of her classes. But of course she was there to discuss her remarkably successful first book "Hidden Figures." All the stars must have lined up just so for Ms. Shetterly. She admitted that she was dumbfounded to discover that her publisher had a bid on the film rights for the story before the book had even been written! And, unlike so many of her predecessors, her experience with the film industry was rewarding and actually fun.

Surely there is no one reading this who isn't familiar with the story of the women, the "human computers," who worked at NASA during the cold war, helping to put a man into space. Kathryn Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughn, were tops in their classes at historically black universities like Hampton Institute, Virginia State, and Wilberforce in Ohio. Their untold stories are now known around the world. Ms. Shetterly was coy about what she's working on next but I can tell you, whatever it is, it will be a must read.

I have been following Jesmyn Ward since she brought me to my knees with her National Book Award winning "Salvage the Bones." http://bit.ly/2xcEnCM What a special delight to find that she was being interviewed by my favorite book reviewer, Ron Charles of The Washington Post.

 

 

Apparently he, too, was blown away by this young woman's work. He compared Ward's new novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing," to Toni Morrison's "Beloved," without batting an eye. Once again Ms. Ward writes about folks in the margins, on the edge, people whose stories would be missing from history without her clear-eyed focus on their grace, strength, and character. Single mothers, grandparents acting as parents, and imprisoned fathers, people whose circumstances are beyond most of our comprehension, are the subjects of Ward's books. They may not be easy to read but they are necessary if we are ever to develop empathy for our fellow wanderers on this earth. I started it yesterday. Will keep you posted.

 

And what does one say about that bad feminist and difficult woman, Roxane Gay? A standing room only crowd laughed knowingly at her political jabs (take that you hillbilly elegist) and were perhaps just a bit taken aback by the smattering of four letter words that she let rip. But what else can Gay do with her anger? Well, she can write. And that she does. I reviewed her memoir "Hunger" not too long ago and can tell you that any time she puts her pen to paper Roxane Gay will tear your heart out.

 

The point is that only she can share her story, a not unfamiliar one that involves rape and its aftermath. Only she can tell you why she ate and ate, avoiding her family's efforts to intervene as her body bloomed. She does not want our sympathy or even our understanding. Writing was the catharsis that likely saved her life. Don't tell her about diet and exercise and don't offer prayers. She's comfortable with herself now, thank you very much. Roxane Gay is a force to be reckoned with. Look for her next work to be in graphic novels.

 



Roxane Gay's Hunger

 

 

Roxane Gay is morbidly obese. She does not shy away from her physician's description. In fact, she deliberately caused it.

 

"I ate and ate and ate," she says, "in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe."

 

At the age of twelve, Ms. Gay was gang raped. The leader of this assault on her young body was a boy she believed she was in love with. She realizes now, with more than twenty years of hindsight, that if she had been able to speak of this horrific invasion of her very selfhood, she might have been able to understand that it wasn't her fault. Her parents, a counselor, might have prevented the punishment she visited upon herself. But as a "good girl," a Haitian-American overachiever, a Catholic, she feared the judgment that might condemn her.

 

This tragedy informed Roxane Gay's life. Her visceral writing seethes with repressed violence. Just dip your nose into "An Untamed State." http://bit.ly/2x0PxKD What other way is there for a wordsmith to work through trauma? Gay is an outspoken essayist, and I have no doubt, a fantastic writing teacher. With "Hunger, A Memoir of my Body," she lays her soul bare, trusting us, the readers, not to judge. It is a work of remarkable bravery.

 

Not only is this book psychologically astute but it is also a remonstrance. Fat shaming, a form of bullying, is alive and well online and in public. The world is obsessed with women's bodies. We have a president who feels entitled to comment on the "shape" of the wife of a world leader, who encourages withholding food from beauty contestants. Ms. Gay reminds us in many uncomfortable ways of the agony of being an oversized woman in a world created for "average" size people.

 

Gay's crowning achievement with this cathartic memoir is learning to love herself so that she can accept the love of others. After an accidental fall that left her hospitalized and laid up for quite a while, she realized that her protective veil of body mass could also be her downfall. Having to rely on family and friends, she opened her heart to love, the true hunger that is the crux of all our yearning.

 

Roxane Gay will be a keynote speaker at the National Book Festival in DC over Labor Day weekend. Though she admits to an aversion to being touched by strangers, it will be hard for me to resist offering a hug. I'll hold back, of course, out of respect for this truly beautiful woman.

An Untamed State - Ferociously Powerful

Roxane Gay (www.roxanegay.com) has been receiving some tremendous press for the past few months, not to mention an op-ed in last Sunday's "New York Times." If you have the stomach for it, you'll understand why when you read her novel, "An Untamed State," just out from Grove Atlantic.

 

 

The dedication page says, "For women, the world over." As you read you may ask yourself why a woman would write about so much shocking violence, aimed at one woman in particular, and then tell you that it's dedicated to you. You may reject it, as I almost did, but you'd be wrong to do so. The point is that women are subjected to subversive violations every day. We shrug and move on. Choose your battles, we say. But, if we are faced with the day when we may need to fight, can we? Will we?

 

In a country like Haiti, the very thought of the divide between the haves and the have-nots is ludicrous. No matter how lost the middle class is in the United States, we simply cannot comprehend the poverty and hopelessness of a battered place like Haiti. It is understandable that some might want to wipe that smug look off the faces of the matrons who hide behind their sunglasses, speed through town in their air conditioned limos, and glide behind the gates of their walled compounds to sterile safety.

 

Still, I was not prepared for the opening chapter, when Haitian born Mireille, her American husband Michael, and their newborn son Christophe, visiting her family's home in Port au Prince, are surrounded and attacked only feet from their fenced driveway. In astoundingly vivid detail, Roxane Gay ratchets up your blood pressure, as a band of young terrorists drag Mireille from her car, little Christophe screaming in the background.

 

Kidnappings, as we know too well from the news media, is a standard means of extracting money from wealthy families in third world countries. Often, victims are returned supposedly unharmed, but the crimes continue. Mireille will not be so lucky. Her father, Sebastien Duval, is a wealthy developer in Haiti. Perhaps, because he had pulled himself up from poverty, Mr. Duval felt immune to the dangerous jealousy and resentment that can build in the hearts of men who have nothing.

 

Unwilling to play games with the kidnappers, Mr. Duval waits twelve long days to negotiate a settlement for his youngest, most loved daughter. Twelve days can be an eternity when one is being tortured. Even reading the specifics felt like too much, too long. Yet now, as I finish this excruciating novel, I realize that it had to be, if only to understand how Mireille survived by dividing herself into two people, the woman before the kidnapping, the tough, proud, Miami litigator, and the one who, though still alive, is dead to her family and to love.

 

This is an amazing novel. I read it in just two days. It is disturbing and may leave you feeling raw. It is a story of love and a failure of love. It is a story of a forgotten country that may be beyond help. It is a story of resilient women and the weakness of men. But most of all, it is a story of power and one woman's defiance, her refusal to allow her captors to hold power over her. It is a story that will be difficult to forget.