Just as it is shallow to reduce the artist to their art, I believe it to be similarly shallow to reduce the ideas of a work to their biographical roots. I can no longer, in good conscience, summarize it this way. She writes, “Something terrible happened, and I wish I could leave it at that because as a writer who is also a woman, I don’t want to be defined by the worst thing that has happened to me.”Īnd yet how would most people summarize Hunger ? I now feel ashamed that for years, in motivating other people to read the book, I described it as the story of a woman who was sexually assaulted and coped with that assault, in part, through food. Returning to the book after the event, I realized that Gay had offered much of the same disclaimer in the chapter where she writes of her sexual assault. Those brief seconds of authenticity reminded me that Gay is a person outside of Hunger - that her memoir and even the event are performances of experience. There were a myriad of other moments that also made me pause, like hearing Gay’s dog bark in the background every once in a while.
You know what I’ve chosen for you to know.’ ” “They feel like they know you,” Gay said. In response to a question about boundaries, she noted that people who had read her work would sometimes try to share their own stories with her, expecting her to help them carry it. Gay seemed intimately aware that this was a potential consequence of publishing her story. I had formed a parasocial bond with her - if not on the basis of her experiences, then on the basis of her passionate writing. It showed instead that my insistence on connecting Gay to her art had actually resulted in me conflating her with her memoir. In reality, the event did little to change my interpretation of the memoir.
My belief that the event would change how I interpreted Hunger showed where I stood on the issue: an artist cannot be, nor should they be, separated from their art. While those examples are not directly applicable to Gay’s work, where you land on them will probably determine how much you think an author’s intention and circumstances should influence your interpretation of their work. Is it okay for me to listen to a controversial artist like Chris Brown? Does my answer change if the artist is dead, like in the case of Michael Jackson? Debates on the ‘death of the author’ phenomenon have by no means fizzled out, but they have acquired a distinctly moral dimension championed by the political left. In some ways, though, my high expectations for the event were not that surprising. This did not, however, stop me from attending an event called Stories Spark Change: Roxane Gay in Conversation with Eternity Martis, assuming it would give me some insight on Hunger, a memoir by Gay that I had read and loved in high school. After all, I had been taught throughout high school and much of university to ignore this biographical urge and focus on the words on the page.
Having studied literature since I was 17, I was under the impression that I was immune to this pitfall. This is evidenced by our interest in finding the biographical roots of the lover figure in so many works of art, from Catullus’ love poetry to Taylor Swift’s songs. Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual violence.Īudiences have always had an ever-present tendency to explain a work of art by investigating the life of its author.