They can be as routine as walking down a familiar street, always assessing for threats. Talk to most women and they'll have dozens of stories of aggressions - both micro and macro - from every stage of life. Those on Twitter who followed Gay - already famous, at least in the indie literary world, for her straightforward, insightful writing about Sweet Valley High, toxic American racism and more - had known that she was a huge fan of the film and book series (and a die-hard member of Team Peeta).īut within a few paragraphs, it became clear that the essay wasn’t your average chronicle of an obsessive love for a film. Rather, Gay used The Hunger Games as an entry point to write about being raped in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods when she was 12 years old, and the end of her illusions of safety and strength. In 2012, Roxane Gay, the founding essays editor at The Rumpus, published an essay ostensibly about about The Hunger Games.
