But she supports feminism's aims, wants equal opportunities for men and women, reproductive freedom and affordable healthcare for all, so she came up with the label Bad Feminist, which punctures the need for perfection. She also worried that feminism didn't allow for natural human messiness. For years she felt that as a black woman – particularly one who has, at times, identified as queer – feminism wasn't for her, because the movement "has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others". In the introduction to the essays, she writes that she openly embraces the label bad feminist, and does so "because I am flawed and human". In print, on Twitter and in person, Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners. While online discourse is often characterised by extreme, polarised opinions, her writing is distinct for being subtle and discursive, with an ability to see around corners, to recognise other points of view while carefully advancing her own. The essays in Bad Feminist were first published in magazines including the American Prospect and on websites such as Salon, Jezebel and the Rumpus, and Gay has gradually built a following and a reputation. Her success is unexpected and delicious – and not only because we rarely see a woman in her late 30s, based in a tiny midwestern town, hailed as the hot new literary darling.
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The culprit is her second book tour in the space of a few months, which will take her from Milwaukee to New York to San Francisco. When I meet Gay at her home in Charleston, Illinois, an apartment furnished primarily with books, she is finishing an essay for the New York Times, engaging a speakers' agency to manage her schedule and struggling with mild insomnia. "Let this be the year of Roxane Gay," Time magazine declared, and so far it is, which appears to be both an exhilarating and exhausting experience. She is publishing two books this year – a collection of essays, Bad Feminist, and her first novel, An Untamed State, which the Washington Post described as smart and searing the Miami Herald praised her "flawless pacing". This tickles her she thinks of herself as a shy person, and when you praise her work, a self-conscious hand rises to cover her eyes and smile. Gay is 39 now, and over the last 18 years she has published countless pieces of fiction and non-fiction, only to find herself described in recent months as an overnight sensation.
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The year had been an adventure – a liberation, but not a resolution.
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Her parents eventually tracked her down – thanks, she suspects, to a private investigator – and she moved back to Nebraska to be near them, enrolling at another university to finish her studies.