When you finish one of Gay’s essays, you see something of yourself that usually stays on the inside.
More than most contemporary “public intellectuals” (I put those words in quotes, not because Gay is neither public nor intellectual, but because the term doesn’t encapsulate the sum total of what she does), her essays are not “hot takes,” but are like the thorns of a cactus that looks beautiful from a distance (she’s a hell of a prose stylist, after all) but draws blood when you get close. To read Roxane Gay is to also feel, in an odd way, like you’re reading yourself at the same time.
