I’ve had the experience of sometimes trying to prepare for something that I think will be traumatic, and then it’s like, surprise! Trauma has its own way of wanting to deal with something. My therapist is a trauma psychiatrist and she talks about exactly what you were just saying, that there’s such a long echo of trauma. It surprises me, all the crevices in the psyche where trauma can lurk. And then, in terms of compounded trauma, I had just started dating somebody and Linda Tripp died unexpectedly. There was a real claustrophobic feeling about quarantine for me-that “have to stay inside”mandate. So, because of that, unless I’m sick, it’s rare for me to not leave my house at least once a day. In the first several months of 1998, I couldn’t go outside. ML: My experience in the beginning of the pandemic was that old trauma made it really challenging.
#ROXANE GAY MONICA LEWINSKY HOW TO#
It got me thinking, how do we teach people how to take a trauma-whether it’s theirs or someone else’s a cultural trauma, collective trauma, so on-and write about it in ways that can be more than just catharsis? Over the course of the semester my students were really astonishing in the different ways that they approached the topic and tried to answer the question I posed to them at the beginning of the semester which is, “How do we write trauma, and how do we do it well?” It really helped me to further refine my thinking. And I was in the unfortunate position of having to reject these truly painful stories that clearly took quite a lot for the writers to submit. Most of the submissions were just straight testimony.
I thought of the class after asking myself, how do we write about trauma? And how do we write about it well? I had edited an anthology called Not That Bad, a compilation of women writing about their experiences with rape culture. Roxane Gay: I don’t know that it changed my thoughts, but it certainly expanded them and helped me develop a stronger understanding. Monica Lewinsky: Did teaching the course on trauma writing change your thoughts about how we write about trauma? I could admit this thing had happened to me, but I was not ready to share the details.” Finally, in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay wrote “directly and openly about my sexual assault, how it changed me, how that assault has haunted me for more than thirty years.” “I wrote around it,” she writes of that book’s description of the assault. The piece, inspired by an undergraduate workshop Gay taught at Yale on writing trauma, describes Gay’s experience attempting to write about being gang-raped at age 12, first in fictional stories written as a teenager, “melodramatic and overwrought and dark and graphic,” and then, as an adult, in work like her essay collection Bad Feminist. “We are walking wounds, but I am not sure any of us know quite how to talk about it,” writes Roxane Gay in her new essay, “Writing Into the Wound,” published on Scribd. In a candid interview, the novelist, essayist, and professor talks to Monica Lewinsky about finding a way to write about terrible things, doing double duty on therapy, and handling all forms of criticism.
#ROXANE GAY MONICA LEWINSKY FULL#
She was teaching a class about how to write about one’s trauma, and the interview is well worth reading in full at the link: So today I’m sharing an interview by Monica Lewinski (anyone remember her?) with Roxane Gay, author of Hunger, Not That Bad, Difficult Women and several more. It’s been a kind of intense week, with weather and health issues and also keeping track of others who were in the midst of their own challenges.