And it remains a choice that they’re still not even now, with everything they know.” It was a choice to not do anything about Covid. And the deaths, the more than 200,000 people who have died now in the United States, that’s preventable. “And it’s alarming to consider that the risk that many people are facing is avoidable. And it shouldn’t be, it should be a right to be safe from a pandemic,” she says. Her lockdown in California was, she is keen to point out, a privileged one.“We’re very lucky that we can afford to not leave the house … to be safe from Covid is a privilege. There were four guests at the wedding while others tuned in online. They were supposed to be married in front of 400 people this month, but the pandemic put paid to those plans. In August she eloped with her partner Debbie Millman. Time magazine called her “the gift that keeps on giving” and another critic praised her ability to “see around corners … Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners”. Gay’s small but mighty memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is a ferociously truthful exploration of sexual assault, PTSD, compulsive eating, weight, dieting and moving through the world as a woman in a larger body. Bad Feminist, her 2014 collection of essays, was a New York Times bestseller. Known for being shy and somewhat reserved in person, the 45-year-old English professor has, in the past 10 years, amassed a powerful body of work including a novel (An Untamed State) and two short story collections (Ayiti and Difficult Women).
Her voice is measured, thoughtful and serious. Her video function is not turned on, so I can’t see her deep brown eyes or six-foot-three frame. Gay is in Iceland on a “top secret” work project which she can’t talk about But that’s fine because Gay, a woman known for radical honesty and original thinking in her writing around queerness and race and feminism, has plenty of other things to discuss. The US feminist author, a hero to many millennial women and to plenty of us in an older demographic, says she is grateful to be on a hiatus from her home country, where there is, as she puts it, “a startling lack of leadership” when it comes to the pandemic. Roxane Gay is on a zoom call from Iceland on her last day of quarantine.