Book Review: Bad Feminist
By Director of Writing Anya Tang
Bad Feminist is intimate. In her collection of essays, author Roxane Gay teaches readers her experiences with navigating feminism while maintaining a level of vulnerability that feels like you’re listening to an old friend recount stories. Gay’s writing is accessible, conversational and frequently ties in pop culture references while also including profound insight and introspection that sticks with her readers long after they’ve finished the book.
What makes Bad Feminist stand out from other contemporary feminist reads was also my initial qualm with the book: Gay’s writing style. Gay discusses and explores feminism in stories about her life while making unconventional writing choices that reveal her personality and humanity. For example, while writing about her experiences playing Scrabble, Gay includes up to 30 footnotes, some multiple paragraphs long, that contain additional internal dialogue and contextualization about her competitive Scrabble-playing. For me, Gay’s decision to include footnotes detracted from her immersive storytelling and left me lost in the message of her essay after my first read-through. These decisions appear elsewhere in her book, such as her 13-point listicle titled “How to Be Friends with Another Woman,” which left me similarly longing for Gay’s deeply-personal storytelling that appeared in most of her other essays.
After I had finished reading Bad Feminist, however, I came to understand Gay’s deliberacy with which she writes her essays: there is intent in her form, and these seemingly-arbitrary formatting decisions are deeper decisions that let the reader view womanhood through Gay’s eyes. Her formatting, structure and constant stream of internal dialogue make reading Bad Feminist a lens to understand Roxane Gay, and I love it. Gay is vulnerable in her writing, and welcomes the possibility that there will be disagreement and discussion over Bad Feminist.
Bad Feminist’s ability to encourage disagreement and deviance from the views identified in the book is what makes it such an impactful read for me. For example, Gay’s essay on trigger warnings is titled “The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion.” She criticizes trigger warnings, but does so by informing her writing with personal experiences and narratives. In doing so, Gay creates an essay where she establishes a powerful claim that trigger warnings are paternalistic and belittling, while also discussing the privilege some have in having access to professional resources. In her essay about trigger warnings, Gay writes of her assertions, “I say this with the understanding that sometimes there is not enough help in the world.” Gay never makes totalizing claims. There is no theory of power, no dense academic terminology used in an attempt to explain the concept of trauma and healing to readers. Gay never claims to explain anything. Yet, in her vulnerability and deliberacy of her storytelling, Gay teaches us to engage in an ongoing discussion with her book and with ourselves about how to explore these difficult parts of our lives.
Reading Bad Feminist was a process of self-reflection: I constantly put down the book for days before returning to it in hour-long bursts, reading and re-reading essays to understand the lessons Gay imparts with her writing. Each time I picked up the book, I returned to its introduction, in which Gay writes, “These essays are political and they are personal. They are, like feminism, flawed, but they come from a genuine place. I am just one woman trying to make sense of this world we live in. I’m raising my voice to show all the ways we have room to want more, to do better.” Gay is right: in embracing each essay’s flaws and intimacy, Bad Feminist is a genuine work of introspection. In being genuine, in welcoming vulnerability, Bad Feminist has taught me to want more and do better.