Gay’s editors had her pare down the brutal violence at points. The novel has a strong relationship with class and with violence against women, though Gay says its a natural progression of the story that they came together. The kidnappers have a humanity that is necessary for the narrative to hold up. “No one is all good or all evil,” Gay says. That wealthy disparity helps explain though not justify the kidnappers she says. As she grew older, it became more difficult. When she was younger, it was easy for her parents to hide the poverty from her. Gay’s parents are Haitian, and as a child they would bring her to the island. The response from them though is that children in Haiti face that kind of trauma all the time. At one point, Mireille believes she will appeal to her kidnappers by reiterating that they took her in front of her child. Privilege, power, and the blind spots that come with privilege are all themes in the novel Botton says. “I didn’t want to co-opt their stories.” After she wrote the draft, she researched some details regarding the injuries, but otherwise the violence and kidnapping are all invented fiction. She says she didn’t read any kidnapping stories before writing the book. The violence and brutality all came from Gay’s imagination. The thrill comes from experiencing the trauma of the narrator. Thrillers all start by explaining what happens and leading the reader through the story with that knowledge. She wrote a lot about Mireille’s Haitian family and their middle-class lifestyle–material that eventually she came to refer to simply as “pre-writing,” the backstory to the novel.
“I knew from the beginning I wanted to tell the story,” Gay says. She leaves for an American education and American husband where they live an upper middle-class lifestyle. Mireille’s Haitian family lives a comfortable life on the Island. Brutal violence and the huge disparity in wealth dominate the novel’s themes. The novel follows the story of Mireille, a Haitian woman kidnapped while on vacation on the island with her white, American husband and their nine month old child. She enjoys working on multiple projects at once. She says she put the book through two revisions, totalling about four months. “By the time something happens, I’m probably already thinking about the precursors,” Gay says.Īn Untamed State took Gay a summer to finish. I love writing,” Gay says before adding, “I live in the middle of nowhere.” She also says she is an insomniac who wants to make that time productive.īotton jokes that she finds herself writing essays and before she has finished writing it out longhand, Gay has already published something on Salon on the topic. The first thing Botton wants to know is how Gay has the time to write as prolifically as she does. Volume 1 Brooklyn hosted Gay at Community Bookstore to discuss her new novel with The Rumpus columnist Sari Botton.īotton has just met Gay for the first time, though they have known each other by email for some time and two of Gay’s essays have been included in collections Botton edited. Essays editor at The Rumpus and a publisher/editor of, Gay is a prolific author with an essay collection on feminism due in August and a memoir relating to hunger and body image in 2016. Roxane Gay’s debut novel, An Untamed State (May 2014) has garnered widespread praise.