love

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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Chapter 53: Vivek Shraya is trashing traditional trans tropes

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I was browsing through a book store a few years ago when I stumbled on a small purple book called I’m Afraid of Men written by Vivek Shraya.

Hadn’t heard of the book! Hadn’t heard of Vivek Shraya! But the provocative title grabbed me so I flipped it over. What was on the back? A simple big solo statement: “And men are afraid of me.”

I opened and kept reading the jacket. Here’s what it said: “A trans artist explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl, and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century. Vivek Shraya has good reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she has endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and for not being feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive her childhood she had to learn how to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak. Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate.”

Needless to say, I was intrigued. I picked up this small book and it transfixed me. It showed me a view and a lens and a perspective that I had no familiarity with and was opening my mind to a culture and people living with so much oppression. I ended up buying more of Vivek’s books, including her wonderful children's book A Boy & The Bindi. And when her traveling live memoiry stageshow How To Fail As A Pop Star visited Toronto my wife Leslie and I bought tickets and joined the giant standing ovation.

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. That bestselling book I’m Afraid of Men was her­ald­ed by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and her album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part‑Time Woman, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books. A six-time (!) Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek was a Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, was featured on The Globe and Mail’s Best Dressed list, and has received honours from The Writers’ Trust of Canada and The Publishing Triangle. And, as if that’s not enough, she’s also Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Calgary!

And now, right in the throes of her book launch for her fiction debut (!) The Subtweet, I had the pleasure of chatting with Vivek from Calgary about a slew of topics I think you’ll enjoy such as how parents can avoid snuffing out their children’s gender creativity and how we might think about using pronouns.

Vivek is able to navigate many complex topics—topics that most people are not even willing to discuss—with a comfort and clarity that shows a deep level of thinking and which is the partial product of the hardships she’s endured and navigated throughout her life. I find her and her work incredibly brave, vulnerable, and important.

I loved talking to her and hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

And now … let’s go!

What You'll Learn:

  • How do you conduct a virtual book tour?

  • How can parents avoid snuffing out the gender creativity in their children?

  • How did colonization induce transphobia?

  • What are the pros and cons of using labels?

  • How might we think about using pronouns?

  • What are some issues with the most common trans narratives?

  • How do we learn to see cultural lenses that we have lived with our whole lives?

  • What is an artist’s real job?

  • And, of course, what are the incredible Vivek Shraya’s 3 most formative books?

notable quotes from vivek shraya:

“There is this whole idea that you can’t love someone else until you love yourself, but for me, it’s actually the opposite that’s been true. It is by loving other brown people, loving other queer people, that I’ve learned to love myself.” – Vivek Shraya #3bookspodcast

“The biggest thing is giving your child the space to be who they are.” – Vivek Shraya #3bookspodcast

“As a culture, we should all be more open and flexible to the possibility of change.” – Vivek Shraya #3bookspodcast

CONNECT WITH Vivek:

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