Roxane felt compelled to ignore the truth of who she saw herself as now: a totally destroyed person at Yale. She couldn’t keep up the act any longer as she entered her junior year, so she quit out and moved in with a possible boyfriend she found on the web. Roxane carried on playing the role of the dutiful Catholic girl who was supposed to become a doctor for a long, and her high grades landed her into Yale University’s pre-med program. As she gained weight, a part of her realized she was becoming physically invisible to predatory males. Roxane was mature enough to see that society does not consider obese women attractive. Food wasn’t only a method to punish her body in her thoughts she believed that the more she ate, the bigger she’d become and therefore the less vulnerable she’d become to another assault. Roxane was moved to a renowned private school a year after the incident, where she could eat as many as she wanted far from her parents’ prying eyes. She couldn’t face the notion of informing her parents about the rape as a result.Īs a result, she kept it to herself and tried to bury the truth even deeper by eating. The incident was terrible on several levels: because Roxane had already been intimate with this guy, she felt a deep sense of shame, as if the attack was her responsibility for rejecting her Catholic upbringing’s ideals. Roxane was raped by her boyfriend and a gang of other local adolescents while she was just 12 years old. What she didn’t anticipate was a horrific act of violence to disrupt her goals and send her on entirely another path. Roxane was reared as a devout Catholic who felt that if she performed well in school, she might become a well-respected doctor. Roxane Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to a family of Haitian-Americans.
It’s not a pleasant story, but it’s one that must be told. There are many autobiographies available, but only a handful convey the narrative Roxane Gay intends you to hear.