The culprit is her second book tour in the space of a few months, which will take her from Milwaukee to New York to San Francisco. When I meet Gay at her home in Charleston, Illinois, an apartment furnished primarily with books, she is finishing an essay for the New York Times, engaging a speakers' agency to manage her schedule and struggling with mild insomnia. 'Let this be the year of Roxane Gay,' Time magazine declared, and so far it is, which appears to be both an exhilarating and exhausting experience.
She is publishing two books this year – a collection of essays, Bad Feminist, and her first novel, An Untamed State, which the Washington Post described as smart and searing the Miami Herald praised her 'flawless pacing'. This tickles her she thinks of herself as a shy person, and when you praise her work, a self-conscious hand rises to cover her eyes and smile. Gay is 39 now, and over the last 18 years she has published countless pieces of fiction and non-fiction, only to find herself described in recent months as an overnight sensation. The year had been an adventure – a liberation, but not a resolution. Her parents eventually tracked her down – thanks, she suspects, to a private investigator – and she moved back to Nebraska to be near them, enrolling at another university to finish her studies.
