from foreign affairs to appropriations and then when you get on the airplane from laredo to houston to washington you spending a lot of time on the plane, so this is where you use some of those ab stat keep your mind active but at the same time you are constantly learning. >> this is her body and impact on life in her memoir under. this program contains language some may find offensive. [applause]

>> roxane gay is the best time author of difficult women and marveled world of the condo. she's a contributor of writers to "the new york times" and has also written for time, the nation, salon and more. her fiction has been selected for the best short stories of 2012 and the best american mystery stories of 2014 among other anthologies. in her new book "hunger," she delivers an honest memoir of food, weight, sub image into learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

joining her on stage this evening is the cofounder and cohost of the call your girlfriend podcast. without further ado please join me in welcoming the amena and the featured author tonight, roxane gay. [applause] we are taking a selfie. [laughter] thinks so much for joining us today. this book is amazing.

i knew i wasn't going to be disappointed. it was very emotional and raw and i was reminded of how generous you are as a person who isn't afraid to say what you're all thinking or should be thinking. >> you want me to elaborate? i wasn't thinking of i wanted my

next project to be i be and thek i want to write least i it's a book about fatness than i realized it's the book i should write the most. my dad told me do something no one else is doing if you want to achieve success. you see a woman on the cover with her formerly fat pants i thought i can't write that book yet and i want to write that book, so why don't i told the story of my body today without apology, just an explanation. many perspectives as we hear about my body and abuse and rape culture, there is a singular narrative of how you are

supposed to react when hard things happen to you. here is where i am and there is such a thing of the empowerment complex is online bucomplexes os where i am and the conversation choosing to call yourself a victim or a survivor. i haven't gotten many reactions because the book isn't out yet. people think the book will be about self-loathing and that isn't what this book is about. it's about what happens when you are beyond lane bryant.

they can still go to the mall and buy an outfit happens when you are bigger than that and find yourself no longer able to shop at a store for clothing? when the world simply doesn't accommodate you. it's a story we don't hear unless you are watching tlc and one of their fur thick explicative shows like my 600-pound wife then it becomes a spectacle and this idea of being ashamed with a doctor that puts people in 1200-calorie a day diet even though at the beginning they say the weight loss surgery has a 5% success rate and i think that let's us know how pervasive the fat phobia is.

that may not be this particular size. she weighs about 90 pounds and is wonderful. [laughter] she is a medical doctor and i love that she's taking up this cause. she is super thin. she will never know what it's like to live in this body that sure, happy and healthy at every size. i'm all for it but i'm also just me and trying to be as realistic as i can.

it confronted the my own history and where i think i am. i had neve have never connectede dots in the way that you laid bare so much. i realize how much of the conversation is being miserable all the time which isn't necessarily true for some of us. mom and dad, cover your ears, this book is not for you. [laughter] realize the conversation doesn't have to center around this.

it's so important to realize you can be fat and have a full life. sometimes we are good at those jobs and people love to tell us it doesn't matter what you achieve as long as you are fat your achievements don't count for anything and i definitely wanted to write against this narrative. i know that i live a full life and this is not the be all to end all and neither is misery that people want us to be miserable and punish ourselves because they feel like it is a problem and we should be constantly apologizing for our bodies. it's not about them. is there a god. >> a man came up to me to give me dieting advice which i thought was hilarious.

a man gave me his name and number but not in a good way. like i'm a nutritionist. like what the fuck, really? the "washington post" did a feature on me over the weekend, don't read the comments, just don't. he e-mailed me last night and so i don't know if you notice, but exercisthatexercise is really ro lose weight and i said you know, i have a phd that, you're right. i have a personal trainer, but i don't know anything. thank you. just walk to work three times a week. and i could tell he was being kind and earnest and that's why i haven't written him back. [laughter]

i'm being earnest, like earnestly go fuck yourself. [laughter] >> is it hard one of the things you are able to talk about is when your body is not the norm? >> people think they can treat you like a garbage can. it makes you like a force field, i thought so but it doesn't work that way. it becomes part of the public conversation at a public property and that is extremely frustrating because people read like one magazine article and

think that they are suddenly an expert and everybody is a doctor. i think it is kindness, they are presenting you a favor with information you somehow had never seen an opera commercial or open the book or seen a television show where the diet culture is consistently being thrown at us. one of the things you do so well is trust open up this conversation around shame

whether it is around of salt or where you feel about your body but that is where i felt that it's just lifting little by little like what were you trying to get to him talking about th this. some people have the audacity to say you're not fat. they try to minimize reality. as i wrote the book i took a hard look at myself over the

years and once i was as fixed as i'm ever going to be, i was comfortable in a certain way of being and that was all i knew and all i did and learning i don't have to apologize for my body which is a work in progress so being able to articulate that. when you go on a book tour making sure it is accessible and you can accommodate different bodies and unfortunately a lot of people think about it.

>> it is going to be tiny seats with rigid arms for people who cannot fit i sit in those seatsd nobody thinks about that because people assume we fit into the world like you do and it is treated as thin and anybody beyond that shouldn't leave the house so i do think accessibility is important and for this tour i ask about every venue would have accessible seating for everyone and different kinds of bodies to see how it goes. >> it's kind of crazy that we all assume this because we see these statistics like the fashion industry doesn't cater to the real bodies of women.

what do you think is going to take to change the conversation? >> i don't know what it's going to take as with all things, a financial imperative to get enough people have to have power to demand that we designed seats that are wider than 17 inches which is the average with the chair. i don't know if that is going to happen because all too often whether it is furniture designers are clothing designers, they are like no, i want to design for a size too otherwise i can't feel artistic and creative which shows you how bad most designers are. [laughter] if you can't imagine you are way ouyour wayout of a size two, whu doing? i don't know what it's going to take. this is one of the final frontiers of discrimination and i don't know what it is going to take. >> if you don't know, how are we going to --

>> you are like my guru right now. >> this one thing i don't know. >> i found myself being very protective of you likely know what she is trying to say but so many people are not going to get it. it's going to fly over their heads. it is a way of people engaging in asking you to describe the league could describe your abilities. you've engaged in this material. >> it's interesting when people read the book but still have learned nothing from it. we did a radio interview with a woman i enter it at least twice before and she said in her npr voice she was trying to connect with me on my level. [laughter]

she was like so, describe your body to me. [laughter] and i stammered and i said i'm paul. i knew what she was trying to get me to do and she expected me to just enter this self-loathing and be like my body is this huge mass, but that isn't how i think of myself because i do need to get through the day. later in the interview she came back and said so, describe her body to me. [laughter] and i lost my stuff and said seriously and she was like yes. no ma'am. i hope they air that. [laughter] [applause] i had a witness. my publicist said it's exactly as bad as you think. [laughter] people don't know how to talk about it and every single review so far i write in the book was my highest weight wise and i

wrote it to give people context because people are bad about guessing numbers of what weight looks like. people think every woman weighs 140 pounds or 110 and she's like no, i'm tuten and every review has mentioned it. every single one. and i'm just like ugh, fuck me, really? >> people still read weight-loss memoirs like it's almost dangerous to write your weight or what it is you're trying to do. they will use it as a manual. >> this is how i don't become her, which would be so lucky. [laughter] it's very frustrating and people want answers. they want it to be a cautionary tale like what is the number where i need to start panicking and just do over.

it's interesting. the coverage has been well intended but interesting. >> you should start panicking when you're not an acclaimed writer probably. [laughter] >> that's really interesting. i loved that you said in the introduction to the book you talk about how specifically it's a memoir about your body. i like where you're at right now and the form itself like challenges on some levels it is a traditional memoir to learn about your childhood and the college years but the way that it's written, i think the focus on the semantics are very interesting. >> i never wanted to write a memoir. i said i would when my parents died but i thought there's nothing in my life that they don't already know where they can't read in the book.

[laughter] so i thought okay if i have a focus it will be easier so i was deliberate about making sure it stayed focused on my body because that is what the book is about. so that's how as i've gotten deeper into the book whenever i felt lost i thought okay whatever it is you're talking about in this moment how does it relate to your body and that helped me stay on course. >> if you don't follow roxanne on the social media platforms, you are a fool because that's where you get a lot of good stuff for free. [laughter] dot like in my group we joke about how good you are on the internet and it's like no, disastrously good. there's parts of reading this book there's this whole site i didn't know about how you spend so much time online talking to strangers in internet chat rooms and like being a contributor and i thought there was obviously

that came from a place of pain, but to see that it goes back again to just how generous you are with sharing your ideas and your life and letting people in on a level they can relate to. >> which i'm always accused of not doing in my actual life. it's so funny. yeah, i've been online probably since 1996. back in the day i went to college and my parents gave me a macintosh and back then we would use the 2400 modem to get online and tie up the phone line and when i would go home i would take this big computer and play with it. laptops that don't exist. [laughter] i would tie up the phone for 16 hours at a time and just talk because i was so shy and just afraid of the world that i had a

very vivid imagination and a very large desire to be out in the world and so i would go on message boards back in the day and just talk to strange people and believe it or not back then the internet was fairly safe. it wasn't what it is today. you could talk to a 40-year-old guy and not get murdered which isn't necessarily the case anymore. i am a writer and so it was great to have this as a medium and so now you see something i've been doing since 96. i should hope i'm good at twitter by this point. >> our culture is so obsessed by case 30 under 30 -- [applause]

i shed a tear when i turned 40 because i didn't make the 40 under 40 list. i was heartbroken. it's so much more than that. it's like part of your success is that you've been doing it forever. like i know what i'm actually doing, but it's also heartening to be like you can tell a lot at something for a long time and then when success and your opportunity comes. i know that meritocracy doesn't exist but i've always told myself cream rises to the top. that's how i've gotten myself

through the many years of obscurity and not being very good. and i got better and better. i was fortunate enough to be raised with the kind of advantages that put me in the position to succeed. like it's not an accident and i very much acknowledged that at all times, but i put in the work so often times people are like overnight sensation. no. if i'm in overnight sensation it is the longest overnight in the history. [laughter] it took some time. >> can we talk about your family? i in love with your family and i hope they will adopt me after tonight. >> for me as an immigrant hearing how close you all are in how your parents have been there at crucial moments even when you

didn't have the kind of the vocabulary and the courage to talk about something that's great because we are mostly about the tensions in immigrant families. >> those were there. i was like 19, 20. when my brothers and i went through issues it was in our early teens or 20s when you shouldn't talk to children at all. [laughter] there's nothing good happening there. we didn't have those tensions for whatever reasons. i had parents that were willing to even when i didn't want to be prevented. they give me advice like what are you doing that you had dinner yet? [laughter] i got this.

i live on my own and everything. my american friends are often surprised like they call you how often? >> every day. i promise. [laughter] it just is what it is and i think often times and marginalized cultures the asset that you have is people and family because lord knows everything else is working against you so that is one of the many reasons we have a very close family. >> that's great. >> you talked about also earlier how you hav had to delay writing some of the books because it was like we talked about how hard it

was. how blessed are you that you can take the time out of your book into the relationship that you have with the team in publishing and all of that? >> i'm very lucky. i would keep making up these deadlines and they are like okay. you know i'm lighting. and i could tell they knew i was lying but they just left me. it was quite sweet. i just really dragged my feet on writing the book because it was so difficult to be open and i was dreading whatever's going to happen in the next two weeks very much, so i'm going to ignore as much of it as i can. i didn't want to face it or myself and finally i just decided do you really want to see back the advance? [laughter]

like that's a lot of money. that's a joke. [laughter] i was just like suck it up, you said you were going to write the books and write the book. and i did finally. i was lucky to be supported by an editor and publisher and agent. they never gave me any pressure. books take time so i was given at the time. >> i'm so glad that you wrote it. >> ask me again tomorrow night how i feel. [laughter] >> do you think oprah has read the book and what should her response be because clearly i feel like she's lagging on talking about it. >> i think she will read the book.

i think she will have a public response and a private response and private will be that little whippersnapper. [laughter] she's oprah winfrey and i will agree with her. >> [inaudible] [laughter] or she will send something from her farm. i also have a farm called whole foods. [laughter] she posted something that was final and she called it something else. >> i love opera like a mother. she helped me get through issues but her farming is so fraudulent. [laughter] i love it. i can't get enough of it. in all of her weight-loss commercials she's in her kitchen cooking. i'm like girl you are not cooking anything in your

50 million-dollar kitchen. and if you are, let me show you how to be rich. [laughter] invite me over and i will talk you through the steps. i don't know what she would say that i think part of her would be like i genuinely believe this isn't the best health and she would give some tv speak about living my best life and that my best wife is in a smaller body not because of societal pressure but a self-actualization. if i had a billion dollars a self-actualization is enough for me. i would rub myself in dollars. [laughter] that's a great note to end on. thank you. you are amazing. [applause]

>> i love that you are a rockstar. i just wanted to follow. here's what's going to happen. we will take a couple of questions from the audience and i mean real questions. don't tell a long story, like we don't need your name and all that. a lot of people want to know things so we are going to take a couple in the audience and then she'll be signing books. >> i didn't get far in the book yet but what was the moment you told your parents and your family what happened? >> i didn't. [laughter]

they know that "time" magazine did an article on my last book and that opened up the familial conversation. i'm very passive aggressive. [laughter] i'm not proud of it. if i could do it overnight would do differently but it's hard to find the words especially so many years later it's quite okay i will just cross my fingers they never hear about the book. who's going to read a book about feminism. [laughter] >> another question. >> just yesterday was discussed by omar u. hillier that? bear with me because we just learned about it yesterday. it pertains to us not being the sum total of our parts that each of our parts having their own

things that inform us. i realize as i'm speaking this might be a moot question but there are new therapies for the example for people with crohn's disease and it changes us and i was curious what your relationshiis yourrelationship u feel that it has informed not just you of your self but informs your writing itself. >> of course it informs my view of myself. i think that is unavoidable. and it has shaped some of my writing but not all because i was writing before i became fact. but i think that you only know how to narrate the world how you know how to narrate the world. you can't segregate parts of your identity and say that doesn't inform everything i am how i write and how i see

myself. it's all connected for me. >> you are my favorites so i just have to ask you -- >> go on. [laughter] i guess in regards to someone like you and i., battling with internal issues like being overweight and finding comfort in food it's something you battle every day for the rest of your life probably. i guess my question is when did you feel comfortable, when was it if clicked for you i don't have to find comfort in food anymore and i can be comfortable with my body? i haven't read the book yet but i've read everything else, just personal moment where you're like i'm i'm done writing this

consume me. >> when i will get there i'll let you know. >> i'm still a work in progress. i don't know that i'm fully there yet for the past six month's have certainly come to as much peace as i've ever been with my body and a food just thinking about my relationship to food and things like that, that's one of the things i write about in the book but it's not a traditional narrative where i've come to some magical realization and everything is big as. that's not what the book is about. for many women in this world i don't know that we ever fully get there. i don't think we are allowed. >> i think we have time for two more questions before we move into the signing portion.

>> first thing, last i heard you talk with 2015 as a keynote speaker. right now i'm in college and you talked a lot about how you felt that your peers saw you as the affirmative action movement. i feel but that's beside my weight is keeping me from realizing the academic potential and i do try my best and i do everything i can and i feel like my opinions and my work is not as valid because of the way my body works and how do you maneuver that because you are an academic hell do you possibly get over that? >> you have to make peace with feeling that this you also have to recognize that you can't

control how other people perceive you and that's one of the things i've always had to do as a black woman in the academy to know people might discount my ideas and my thinking and by a research, but that's not about me it's about them so no matter how insecure you are you have to have this sense of calm since that you belong in the academy and that your ideas are as valid as anyone else's. a lot of times we count ourselves out. we segregate ourselves as protection of the say you know what that's not for me so i am not even going to go there. the other thing you have to do is resist the temptation to hide and quiet your voice and make yourself as small as possible because the only person you are compromising its yourself and the only education your compromising is your own so it is a constant battle and you shouldn't have to do that work to be accommodating and people shouldn't look at fat people and

think you are not as intelligent because you are fat. but i often say i'm going to change faster than the world is so you have to encourage people to respect you and demand that people respect you why also just being realistic about the amount of time it might take to get to that place so you can't count yourself out or not good for study groups, you can't not volunteer for various opportunities. you have to put yourself in the game every single time. [applause] i saw a hand raised over here. >> i am a middle school teacher and when i was in middle school, we read very boring stuff and so i am trying to not have my students read the boring stuff.

i've been reading some of your work and they've been really impacted by it. i invited my students here but they couldn't come unfortunately. >> middle schoolers, so unreliable. [laughter] >> i wonder what advice i can cn give to you specifically. >> the most important thing you can tell young writers is what i told myself which is to take yourself seriously. when i was 15, 13, four, seven, i took myself seriously, i did. like i'm going to be a writer and my parents were like you need an actual job while you do your little writing thing. [laughter] but the reality is you do need a day job, which i still have.

so, you have to encourage them to take themselves seriously because no one else will and that's really all they need to know. so many writers don't understand you need to read as much as you write and understand that's how you learn what to do and what not to do. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us let's have another round of applause. [applause] if you have a book you would like to get signed we ask that you remain in your seats for just a moment to get the stage ready for the signing portion of which time we will call you a pro by rove. if you would like to purchase a copy is available right here at the cash registers in the back. thank you. ask the

[inaudible conversations] >> i have a couple of books. i never read just one at a time. i'm finishing up a novel by one of my favorite authors named robertson who is a canadian called the canadian man. and also rereading john f. kennedys profiles in courage which is a great book for a

senator because it's all about what happens in the senate historically. i'm listening to a book i downloaded about peter the great, a long biography about peter the great and if you want to understand russia and putin, you've got to go back and read about this in the 16 hundreds. i've also just gotten the book the american spirit, and one that i'm really enjoying is a book about washing pens farewell address. so that's what i'm into right now, listening on the airplane and reading when i have time. there is a novel about toronto or the american spirit by david mccullough or something in between. those are some great titles that you are looking at right now. what does it take to captivate

your attention for you to read a book? >> i've thought about that and when i go to browse an online service to download a book online or to listen to i started history. that's the category i first go to. a few weeks ago i finished the book dereliction of duty about vietnam and that is a timely book because he is now the national security adviser to the president so reading his book which is an incredibly powerful and analysis of the lyndon johnson administration and the mistakes they made in vietnam was interrupted so how do i pick a book? i started history and i listen to reviews and certain authors, you can't go wrong. anything by 1776 john adams, anything he's written is going to be an engaging and interesting and you will learn something.

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