Chapter 67: Roxane Gay on lessons in love and the lethal lure of likeability

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Provocative bestselling author. Prestigious editor. Prolific book reviewer. Passionate press founder. Prominent professor. Powerful speaker. Perceptive social commentator.

Phew!

Is it any wonder Roxane Gay has been dubbed by Playboy as the most important and most accessible feminist critic of our time?

Over 1,000,000 people follow Roxane across Twitter, Instagram, and GoodReads, where she is, no big deal, currently the #1 ranked best book reviewer on the entire platform. So she’s an Internet junkie then, right? One of those social media “influencer” people? That kind of thing?

Oh no, no, no, no, no! Roxane Gay is not that. She writes the Work Friend column at The New York Times as well as regular Op-Eds. She is the author of numerous bestselling books including Ayiti, Bad Feminist, An Untamed State, Difficult Women and Hunger. She was an editor for The Rumpus, co founded PANK literary magazine, and is currently editor at Gay Mag. She launched Tiny Hardcore Press (in her words, publishing “books tiny in stature but grand in reach and spirit,”) and has been a professor at Eastern Illinois, Purdue, and Yale.

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Roxane’s work is known for challenging mainstream narratives and deconstructing feminist and cultural issues through the lens of her personal experience as a Black queer writer. I spent weeks preparing for this conversation and felt like a ravenous wolf trying to read and listen to as much Roxane as I could find. I read and loved Bad Feminist, dug into her treasure trove of essays on Medium, and listened to her on many podcasts including two episodes on the wonderful Design Matters with her wife Debbie Millman. And still: I didn’t scratch the surface. She is such a prolific voice.

We talk relationships, love, morality, sex, and, of course, her three most formative books. Are you ready to hang out with Roxane’s incredibly compelling mind?

Let’s go!

PS. This chapter is in partnership with Roxane and Performance Space NY, an alternative arts hub currently raising funds for housing insecure Black and trans artists. The arts world needs us all the time but even more so during this pandemic. Please consider donating. I will match all 3 Books listener donations up to $5000. Please email Manuela at manuela@globalhappiness.org with your donation receipt. Thank you!

What You'll Learn:

  • How do you navigate the TBR (to be read) pile?

  • What are the ingredients for finding love?

  • What does it mean to be loved well?

  • What is cultural relativism?

  • What is the true power of a book?

  • How do we teach kids about sex these days?

  • Why is it so destructive to associate sex with shame?

  • How do we stop caring about what other people think?

  • How do we become better writers?

Notable quotes from Roxane Gay:

“There isn’t any nobility in settling.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“A lot of self-help has you believe that you have to find that thing within yourself and that if you work hard enough at loving yourself you will be ready for someone to love you and that’s just nonsense. It might work for 4 people. But most of us are full of self loathing and people love us anyway.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“I didn’t really learn that I deserved to be loved well until I was loved well.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“When we talk about cultural relativism, especially in the United States, we tend to be overly prescriptive and to think that what is good for us is inherently good for everyone else, but that’s not the case.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“When we talk about wokeness really what we’re saying is that you make me uncomfortable because you are forcing me to question my place in the world and how the world functions and how I benefit from it.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“I think we have to decouple sex from shame and from morality, and do so in age-appropriate ways, and in ways that respect parents’ values.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“In a perfect world, children would not feel like sexuality is this shameful secretive thing.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“It’s not necessarily a question of how we learn to live with being unlikeable, it’s how we learn to stop placing value judgements on behaviours of others.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

“Being unlikable is not unacceptable.” - @rgay #3bookspodcast

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