Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is the author, narrator, and main character in Bad Feminist. She is the daughter of Haitian immigrants and a professor at a university in an unnamed rural location. She has a PhD and teaches writing at the undergraduate level. Gay identifies as a "bad feminist" because she accepts that she has "interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism" (xi).

Gay describes herself as unpopular in her school days. Like many writers, she read copiously. She was a "good girl" with conservative parents who got good grades, went to church, and was polite to her elders. When Gay was in middle school she was physically and sexually assaulted by a group of male classmates. As a teenager, Gay engaged in emotional eating in response to that trauma. "There was an incident with some boys in the woods...