Roxane Gay’s New Pop-Up Magazine Will Change How You Think About Your Body
This month on Medium, Roxane Gay—acclaimed author of Hunger, freshly appointed Guggenheim fellow, and Twitter slayer extraordinaire—is assembling perfect truths about one of the world’s last great mysteries: the human body. The pop-up magazine, titled Unruly Bodies, offers an anthology of essays by a dream team of 24 acclaimed writers that provides an eye-opening education into the ways a body can refuse, resist, shock, and persist. The prompt was simple, writes Gay in her editor’s letter: “What does it mean to live in an unruly body?”
What follows is a gripping collection of personal essays that reminds readers that the stories about our bodies—the unreasonable expectations surrounding beauty and aging; the exhaustive journey to overcoming addiction; the inherent shame that rushes in while blood pours out of a young woman during her period; the body untethered by gender—is a magnifying glass into our culture.
And then there are those bodies that submit to illness. Fiction writer and lifelong epileptic Casey Hannan meditates on his need to study the moment his mind is lost amid the “black hole” of a seizure, when “all that’s left is my twitching, idiot body,” as he writes of his battle with the condition in “The Body That Breaks the Rules.” In his own heart-rending essay, Matthew Salesses’s intimate exploration of his Korea-born wife’s experience with stage-four stomach cancer amid a politically fraught time for immigration and health care drives him to ask the question: “Why does one body that doesn’t follow the rules make other bodies so uncomfortable?”
And in the very first sentence of the University of Mississippi professor Kiese Laymon’s essay, titled “I Am a Big Black Man Who Will Never Own a Gun Because I Know I Would Use It,” the author contemplates what carrying a gun in the classroom would look like for a person of color. Through his personal essay about history, race, and guns in America, Laymon not only examines why his body and the bodies of his fellow African-Americans make others—namely President Trump, whose policies he describes as racist and oppressive—treat them unjustly, but also demands change.
Many of the essays grapple with the subtext of another persistently elusive frontier: the mind, with its ability to sustain invisible wounds, wrestle with anxiety, fall in love, and, sometimes, heal.
The common thread throughout this striking collection of narratives, which bind together vastly different faces, shapes, sizes, and places in society, is that it’s time to tell the truth about our relationships to our bodies, and with bodies other than our own.
Roxane Gay will continue to publish new features in Unruly Bodies each Tuesday in April on Medium.
