And I should have been prepared, from her writing, for the frequent split between a disembodied freedom on the page and an unease in the world the way in which her fame and imposing 1.9 metres (6ft 3in) frame are undercut, as she put it in a recent essay about her decision to have weight-loss surgery, by the fact that “the moment I step outside the safety of my home, I hate how visible I am, how people treat me, how they stare and comment both loudly and under their breath … I do not know how to carry myself with confidence when I go out into the world. At the same time I know, from Twitter, that jetlag and newness have caused two days of insomnia. She waits for the tape to be turned on and answers questions dutifully. Meeting her is thus already overdetermined, and made more complicated by a presence that seems, on this cold bright morning, not much like the writing voice: Gay makes little eye contact. Photograph: John Seaton Callahan/Getty Images Haitian connection … the stories in Roxane Gay’s collection Ayiti are drenched in a physical sense of the place. We have a lot in common, and I do think literature allows us to have some sort of shared empathy.” “We all deal with complicated relationships, with children, with the loss of children, with love and suffering. “What we tend to forget is that we all deal with a lot of the same things,” she says.
But details ground the stories, in the rural midwest, for example, or a gated community in Florida, or a strip club in Baltimore. “As a black woman, as a black queer woman, specificity is incredibly important, because diverse experiences are rarely seen in literature.” She agrees that fairytale “informs all of my fiction work” – there is the woman married to an identical twin whose brother takes turns coming to her bed in the belief she doesn’t notice, or the woman who is also a knife, or the miner so despairing of his life underground that he projects himself into the sun and puts it out – “because in the original fairytales there’s oftentimes a lot of suffering before you get to any kind of resolution or solace”. Gay’s stories often take the form of fable although, on her first visit to London, she is quick to reject that as any appeal to universality. A quirk of nature – that lightning striking sand can make glass – becomes an inspired vehicle for preoccupations that recur throughout Gay’s work: that love means not being seen through, but seen, and heard for yourself that bodies are both breakable and a possible source of redemption. When he holds her he does so gently, and not just because he must. At meals, he marvels, watching the food travel through their bodies. He falls in love, marries her, they have a glass child.
T here is a story in Roxane Gay’s second collection of short fiction, Difficult Women, in which a big, strong man who works in a quarry goes for a walk on the beach and, seeing an extra glint in the sand, discovers a woman made of glass.