How does Ivanka get her hair so straight like that? It’s unnatural but I am curious. Evita Junior, basically makes it seem like she is the co-president, and the president drones on and on, struggling to read the teleprompter for more than an hour, as his assembled, unmasked audience offered tepid, forced applause, standing up and down to the orange menace. It will only make me furious and disgusted. I also don’t need to watch the Republican National Convention. I generally make my own dough and the whole shebang, but tonight I use a pizza kit from Lupa Cotta, a local pizza maker here in Los Angeles.ĩ p.m.: Cable news is terrible. I do not particularly care for pizza, but she is a devoted fan.
I am the cook in our little family, so while my wife was in a meeting (there’s a pattern here), I make dinner so it will be ready by the time she finishes around 8. And it does matter.” Here, in a three-day wellness diary, Gay similarly nurtures the body and the mind, from a night-owl rereading of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom to a VR workout she actually enjoys.ħ p.m.: I was in meetings or teaching all afternoon. It’s Lorde’s 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” that resonated most, Gay explains, “because, especially during times like these, we tend to question the value of art and poetry and literature. “She valorized the body as much as she valorized the mind,” Gay writes in the introduction. Themes of police violence, housing instability, and the marginalization of Black women surface in the book-alongside the sensory pleasures of a kiss or hair washed with fresh flowers. “Unfortunately, so much of what Lorde was writing about 30 years ago is still applicable today,” says Gay, who imagines that Lorde would be “absolutely unsurprised” at what little has changed. But a new collection of Audre Lorde’s work, edited by Gay and out this week, speaks to the need for a deeper kind of stamina.
Girding for the long haul seems wise in a year worn down by pandemic, social injustice, and election malaise amidst all that, Gay is juggling book projects, a New York Times advice column, and screenwriting, plus a podcast she cohosts called Hear to Slay. “I just recognize that, in general, it’s required for stamina.” For her, there’s longevity to consider, and weight loss-“but not in the way that is toxic,” she points out. Lately, that unruliness is matched by Gay’s commitment to fitness tedium. In the previous year’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay offered up her own answer in unsparing, incisive detail.
“What does it mean to live in an unruly body?” asked Gay in a prompt to writers for her 2018 pop-up magazine with Medium. It qualifies as #fitspo, but Gay’s version refuses to conform to influencer banalities. “34:33 cardio,” a recent caption read, her face glistening and joyless beneath a hot-pink head wrap. It’s “all horrible,” the writer explains by phone, her tone as blank as her post-workout selfies on Instagram Stories. Roxane Gay has nothing good to say about her exercise bike.