Roxane Gay’s Favorite Books

Gay writes a lot about trauma, teaches about it, and reads about other people’s trauma often. “Heart Berries” is a work about trauma she recommends in her Scribd Original, “Writing Into the Wound.” “It’s a story of survival and poverty and oppression and mental illness and what it means to be an Indian girl, an Indian woman. So much of the book is brutal, but Mailhot tells her story so beautifully that the brutality becomes just bearable enough,” Gay wrote.

Imagine a crossover episode between “The Office” and “The Walking Dead,” and you’ve got Ling Ma’s terrific debut novel. It somehow manages to satirize everything from careerism to apocalyptic thrillers without sacrificing empathy or believability. A super smart page-turner. Gay considered it one of the best books of 2019.

Many tough choices face the titular Patsy: She decides to leave Jamaica, her daughter, and her husband looking for a better life in America and her first love, Cicely. While she boldly holds the reins of her life, it doesn’t stay on course, and she’s left trying to navigate through her desired dreams and harsher reality. This rounded out Gay’s top books of 2019 list.

Thirteen women living on the margins are murdered, and the search for the killer leaves something to be desired. Fifteen years later, when another woman winds up dead through similarly gruesome means, the survivors again fight for their voices to be heard. Ivy Pochoda’s work was shortlisted for the Edgar Award for best novel, and included in Gay’s list of “10 Books to Bring You Out of the Dark.”

Few books in 2020 were more beautiful, eye-opening, and highly regarded than “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.” It’s a collection of short stories about Black women trying to live true to themselves within the hypocritical system of the church. Gay included it in her Bookshop.org list of reads that will bring you out of the dark.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, “The New Wilderness” is a suspenseful dystopian novel from the author of “Man V. Nature.” In the not too distant future, humans are dropping like flies due to climate change, pollution, and overpopulation. Five-year-old Agnes is failing fast, so when an experimental government study opens up, her mother jumps at the chance to join a small group of survivalists in the last patch of unfettered nature. Gay called it “a gripping, fierce, terrifying examination of what people are capable of when they want to survive” in her Bookshop.org list.

A simple premise belies the provocative racial themes that unfold in this slow burn thriller. A white Brooklyn family rents a luxurious house in the Hamptons for a weeklong getaway, but they’re barely settled in when there’s a late night knock at the door. It’s an older Black couple claiming to be the owners who rented the house out, but they’re back due to a severe power outage in the city. With no internet or cell phone access in this remote area, it’s difficult to verify what’s really going on. The tension keeps ratcheting up until the pulse-pounding end. Gay calls it “an exceptional examination of race and class and family and what the world looks like when it’s ending — not at all different from the world we are in now” in her five star Goodreads review.

When the narrator, a Palestinian American teenager living in Bethlehem, comes out to her mother as queer, her mother responds with the titular “You exist too much.” This is one of many poignant scenes in Zaina Arafat’s beautiful debut novel that deals with identity (cultural, religious, sexual) and how hard it can be to grow up no matter what your circumstances. Gay gave it five stars on Goodreads, writing, “Hypnotically meandering narrative structure. Deeply compelling protagonist. Lovely sentences.”

Diana Clarke is touted as “a talented protégé of Roxane Gay,” so it’s no surprise that Gay holds this novel about the dark underbelly of diet culture in high regard. Lily and Rose are twins who were once identical, but have succumbed to different eating disorders: Lily consumes everything, while Rose starves herself. As one would expect from a student of Gay, this novel deals beautifully and rawly with abuse and trauma.

Set in the political turmoil of the 1960s, this vibrant coming-of-age novel explores the propulsive forces behind immigration. When 15-year-old Ana’s parents marry her off to a man twice her age, she leaves her home in the Dominican Republic countryside to start a new life in New York, determined to find a way to bring her family over to join her. Gay gave it a perfect five stars on Goodreads.