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gabmc 's review for:
Short and sweet - not the topic, but Roxane Gay's writing. Funnily enough I came across Roxane Gay through our shared love of all things Bravo. It makes me feel OK about liking 'Real Housewives' if someone as smart as Roxane Gay likes them too! This is an essay about writing on/about trauma. I listened to the audio version, read by the author herself and was mesmerised. These are just some of her words that I found inspiring:
“To change the world, we need to face what has become of it. To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.”
“There is no pleasure to be had in writing about trauma. It requires opening a wound, looking into the bloody gape of it, and cleaning it out, one word at a time. Only then might it be possible for that wound to heal.”
“Not all writing about trauma is created equal. As with most subjects, writers can be careless with trauma. They can be solipsistic. They can write concerned only with what they need to say and not with what an audience might need to hear. They assume that their trauma, in and of itself, is the only story they need to tell, or that having experienced trauma is inherently interesting. Or trauma serves as pornography - a way of titillating the reader, a lazy way of creating narrative tension, as if it is only through suffering that we have a story to tell. We see trauma as it unfolds but are rarely given a broader understanding of that trauma or its aftermath.”
“To change the world, we need to face what has become of it. To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.”
“There is no pleasure to be had in writing about trauma. It requires opening a wound, looking into the bloody gape of it, and cleaning it out, one word at a time. Only then might it be possible for that wound to heal.”
“Not all writing about trauma is created equal. As with most subjects, writers can be careless with trauma. They can be solipsistic. They can write concerned only with what they need to say and not with what an audience might need to hear. They assume that their trauma, in and of itself, is the only story they need to tell, or that having experienced trauma is inherently interesting. Or trauma serves as pornography - a way of titillating the reader, a lazy way of creating narrative tension, as if it is only through suffering that we have a story to tell. We see trauma as it unfolds but are rarely given a broader understanding of that trauma or its aftermath.”