Selling books and CDs and DVDs to used book stores. Finding a twenty in my mother’s car and pocketing it. Lying to friends to borrow a few bucks until payday. Searching the bottoms of purses and jacket pockets and kitchen drawers for coins. Lying awake nights doing budget gymnastics. In rehab, we were often reminded, “Work as hard at your sobriety as you did to get your next drink.
Hunger by roxane gay malaprops how to#
I like the way Phillip Lopate puts it: “The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.”īut more than anything, I wanted to show the addict whose struggle includes how to fund that struggle. The other reader is the one who needs to know she’s not alone in her struggle. One will learn about people who live such lives, and in that way, the essay becomes a keyhole through which a reader can look to glimpse a hidden life. When I write, I’m always thinking of two readers. I suspect we’re all learning that there are consequences when we stay silent.Īs Didion warns, “ I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Why is it important to you to not only write such stories but also publish them? What do you hope to achieve? In this essay you write, “I am listing these things, trying to remember all of them, trying to avoid what I pawned, more than once, to get through the month without giving up wine.” In this moment and others throughout the essay, it’s clear that you feel ashamed of actions you’ve taken, and it seems it would be easier to keep silent about them. Also, looking back at that other essay in “Bottom Shelf” contributes to the confessional mode of the piece. In rehab, the counselors often called me out on “hiding behind my writing.” I realized I had done that in those paragraphs-how those repeated mentions of glass revealed a subtext of the broken bottle and how I kept the reason why I was in the pawn shop hidden. We don’t have to be all of who we are or were, rather the persona the essay requires. That other essay is not about addiction, it’s about searching, about place, and as writers, we establish the persona for the questions the essay is asking. That other essay presents a persona who is a curious observer (both of the objects and the people in the shop), but avoids divulging that I was one of those people, desperate at the counter.
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Can you tell us about what that process was like for you? Do you revisit your finished works often? Did you discover things in your own writing that you didn’t expect to find?Īs I began writing about the pawn shop, I remembered I had included it in another essay, in another context. In this essay, you look back at another essay you once wrote, quoting lines from it, analyzing and recontextualizing them. I wrote “Bottom Shelf” immediately after finishing Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath. Please tell us about the origins of your essay “Bottom Shelf.” What caused you to start writing the first draft?
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Here, Jill Talbot talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about personas, subtext, and sharing struggle. Her essay, " Bottom Shelf," appeared in Issue Ninety-Nine of The Collagist.
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She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as AGNI , Brevity , Colorado Review , DIAGRAM , Longreads , The Normal School , The Paris Review Daily , River Teeth, and Slice Magazine and has been recognized by The Best American Essays. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.J ill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, as well as the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.
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As a woman who describes her own body as 'œwildly undisciplined,' Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. Bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health.