Thank you for the opportunities to read this book. I have attempted it on a number of occasions but unfortunately I haven’t been able to get into it.

This was an ambitious novel that touches on several big concepts. I enjoyed the story, but overall it felt like it was reaching for a little bit too much without fully delivering.

This book explores the real world of rape culture on college campuses and in society as whole. It reaches into the dark places of the words like "consent and consensual" as well as what it means to learn the meaning behind them. It shows the difficultly of living as women so far from their known homes and world and themselves and yet so close to learning who they are and where they belong.
Its a very intelligently done book that has a good amount of witty, if not biting and a good amount of cringe-worthy moments.
Its not at all a book for everyone. But its a book that everyone might find some kind of connection to anyways. And sometimes finding yourself in some way represented as a book -truthfrully and real and so clearly stripped down to the core that its hard to read about.

And sure this book does tend towards melodrama and cringe moments, both theoretically and physically. But at the age range the characters are and what they are going through, can you really expect something else?
In some ways its very much the type of book that is absourelty overdaramtic and theatrical that you ask yourself while reading its honestly written and published that way. And what the author was thinking writing it that way!
In some aspects it really gone a bit overboard.

But what i found much more important in and with this book is how it handles the overall real topic: rape.

If someone is raped, while at a frat party and being drunk, is she to blame? Is it her fault for going there? Drinking? Not being more careful? If something results of that rape is that her fault as well? Does she has an obligation to keep the result of an unwanted and forced sexual encounter? Or shouldn't she even have to think about having an abortion?
This book points those topics out, but not in a way that the reader automatically knows what the author wants you to think, but rather that the author wants you to think. She wants you to see what happens and figure it out yourself.
And since we are being real, let me just say here:
The rapist is always the responsible person! Nobody else is to blame! there is no real other option, because rape is a single and unnecessary act of violence that can be completely avoided if the rapist would do the work and find a willing participate -which lets be real here if we keep with the example of a college frat party? Its not that hard to find a willing not completely drunk partner!

Back to the actual book... the author did a good job. She made it a thought provoking book, she made it realistic and real and world relatable and she made it all fit nicely together.
Yes it could have been written a little less overdramatic and as if a theater major went to down on a script.
But overall its a great book and deserves more readers!

One of the best novels I’ve read this year and one that has stayed with me. I would, without a doubt, recommend this to many of my book-loving friends.

This is a tough book to review. It is not a book that I think anyone will really "enjoy", as it is such a heavy subject and this does not hold back. There were elements that were excellent, but it still offered a few too many excuses to the "golden boys" for me to get fully behind this.

In the vein of Donna Tartt, The Red Word tells the tale of Ivy League feminists pushing up against the fraternity society. Joining a world of anti frat activists, protagonist Karen gets heavily involved in a campus wide dispute on the issue of fraternities and women's rights. This is a really interesting take on an issue that deserves more attention with each passing year. The characters are genuine and the downward spiral of radical activism makes for a compelling read.

Absolutely brilliant.
The story careers and crashes through the lives of the Raghurst women and all who surround them, yet it stays in the perfect control of the author.

A modern day parable unpicking some of the moral maze the #MeToo generation are living through. It is high-minded and literary without being sanctimonious or preachy.

I loved the Greek elements, this is a 'Secret History' for a new generation and Henstra's writing rivals Tartt's.

The Red Word is an intelligent, thoughtful and dark analysis of rape culture as it exists today on college campuses around North America. Karen lives with a group of radical feminists, and yet somehow ends up in a relationship with a fraternity boy whose frat house is nicknamed "Gang Bang Central." Not oblivious to the irony of the situation, Karen tries to strike a balance between her sweet relationship with one of the brothers, and her more edgy connection to her sisterhood of roommates. The Red Word captures the binary experience of college life as a woman, and the complicated relationships that are formed in early adulthood that shape us throughout our lives. I absolutely loved it and can't wait to read more by Henstra.

I agree with the over arching themes of the book: rape.on college campuses is a problem and passivity is not going to solve it, nor is victim blaming. however, I feel this book approached the issue in a terribly dangerous way--by making the feminist group the instigators, it flips everything around and gives an opening for people to go "see, it's really just women making this up, men arent doing anything wrong. we're just partying!" and we all just go on the way things are. this could have been a really important book to shine the light on a really important problem....and instead it just confuses a critical issue.

Couldn't put this book down. Complex multi-layered commentary on rape culture masquerading as chick lit. Quick, dimensional and thought-provoking. Should be a must-read for University students everywhere.

A really interesting and well told story with wonderful writing. I found myself thinking about it when I was reading it and raced pack to pick it up. Henstra knows how to put together a compelling story.

In the thought-provoking The Red Word, Sarah Henstra explores rape culture on college campuses, particularly in fraternity houses. Narrator Karen Huls arrives at an unnamed Ivy League college in 1995, where she becomes torn between two worlds: the feminists she lives with and the fraternity house where her boyfriend lives. The feminists hate the fraternity, which they call Gang Bang Central, and for good reason. There’s a basement in the house where they are rumored to gang-rape women. A good friend of theirs was impregnated and abandoned by one of the head fraternity guys. And the usual: women are given way too much to drink, treated like objects, and rape is permitted if not openly encouraged.

At the same time, Karen loves being a girl in the frat house. She likes being seen as “one of the guys” and she also likes the sense of being desired but, because she’s a girlfriend, being off-limits. I think in a way she also likes the danger. Boyfriend Mike tells her never to leave his room at night, as if she might be assaulted the minute she’s apart from him. She challenges him on this, yet also doesn’t take it very seriously.

The Red Word is a book that looks at even the way we use the term rape.

“Rape” was a red word, a greedy word. It was a double-sided axe brandished in a circle over the head. It drew all kinds of attention to itself.

“You were going to say get raped, right? You were going to say I let her get raped. Like get wet, like I left her out in the rain or something. … They want us to treat rape like a naturally occurring phenomenon, like weather.”

All of which reminds me of my own college experience, where you could choose to be a part of Greek life or stay the hell away, and I chose the latter. I can’t say I have any direct experience with fraternity parties because I wouldn’t have gone to one without an army at my side, and why subject yourself to that experience? As a college student, I read books about rape on college campuses, very much like Jon Krakauer’s Missoula, so you can see it’s been 25 years and nothing has changed. I even interned in a sex crimes division of the district attorney. That was my college experience: I had my guard up.

What infuriates me now is how accepted it all was. I had friends who dropped out of school because of rape, and everyone just nodded and said, yup, that’s how it is. Women on campus were told where we could walk, and when, and with whom, all in the name of protecting ourselves. Because as Karen says in this book, women are rapeable. It’s not about who’s doing the raping, it’s about putting all these rules and limits on our lives and when the worst happens, we’re at best sympathized with, and at worst torn to shreds for what we did.

Okay, I’m ranting. Back to the book.

I should tell you first off that this book reminded me eerily of The Secret History, and that’s a good thing because it’s one of my favorites. It’s set on a college campus, about a group of students studying Greek, and it’s told through the eyes of a narrator who is something of an outsider, torn between belonging to two different groups, and who views everything through a somewhat distant, though at the same time intimate, lens. The story pivots around an act of violence that our narrator is left out of and discovers gradually. Even the character of Charla reminded me of Camilla – a vision, a free spirit, but a character who never quite feels real.

And like The Secret History, it will help if you find Greek language/literature mildly interesting. Because of the similarities in writing style, I think both of these authors must have been influenced by the subject. Both books present Greek as not just a language or literature or mythology, but as something that’s the core of our identity.

If you mind that, and if you mind Henstra’s parallels with Greek epic literature and language, this book may annoy you. I didn’t mind it, but I don’t know that I completely understood it either, and sometimes it felt distracting. Still, I appreciated Henstra’s writing style, which is both poetic and direct at the same time.

My frustration with this book was with the narrator herself. She’s presented in this book as a neutral observer, someone without a strong personality who takes on the character of the group she’s with. As such, she presents an interesting and at times scathing view of both the feminists and the fraternity guys. But practically speaking, she’s annoyingly dense and overwhelmingly passive. She’s “dating” this guy she doesn’t even really like (though he’s clingy and controlling so I wasn’t sympathetic for him either). She cares about her friends but never really becomes part of their circle. And she’s bothered by the signs of sexual assault she sees in the house, but when confronted with it, does nothing.

I also found the modern day part of the story difficult to connect to, and the back and forth detracted from the real story. There was too much time spent describing Karen’s speech at a conference, and when she finds out that a friend died we learn almost nothing about what happened. Also, Karen is supposed to be this amazing photographer, yet in the story her photography is something she mentions once in a while, not something she seems passionate about.

All together though, this book was hard to put down and raised really important and complex issues about feminism, moral culpability, and how we see rape, sexuality, and women’s bodies. My niece started college last year and when I asked her about safety at parties she said she knows not to drink anything given to her in a cup. How awful is that?

In this year when suddenly women’s issues are front and center, this book couldn’t be more timely. Only at the same time, how sad is it that we’ve lived with this for so long, and done so little.

Note: I received an Advanced Review Copy from NetGalley and publisher Grove Atlantic. The book published March 13, 2018.

tl;dr Review:

A unique take on feminism, the party culture surrounding colleges, and the sexual assaults that take place on their campuses.

Full Review:

I know some of you may be reading that short description thinking, WTF does that even mean? What's a "unique take" on rape and bro culture? But trust me when I say, this is it.

This fiction novel tackles everything from feminism and its inherent flaws, to sexual assualt, to the "frat bro" culture and more that take place across this country on every college campus. I related to every emotional and mental twist and turn that the book took because I've been there - I've been that feminist torn with the idea of what the line is and where it's drawn in terms of sex.

Some of my best friends (including the man that introduced me to my husband) are fraternity brothers and I spent many a night crashed on one of their sofas.

Granted, this fraternity was known for it's scholarly excellence and prided itself of only accepting true gentlemen while the fraternity in the book was pretty much the exact opposite. Still though, I know how the protagonist felt because I've been that "sister" to a house before. I've been that friend to guys who treated me like I was one of the brothers.

I also know the emotional, physical, and mental anguish caused by sexual assault, both personally and from hearing about it from friends. This review, and honestly this book as well, isn't in any way trying to make light or downplay that issue.

I feel as though I can't really describe this book accurately because it's so nuanced and unique that I don't want to say too much and give too much away.

Here's how the publisher described it:

A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry—particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus.

GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed “Gang Bang Central” and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore.

As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture—but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.

The nuances and side thoughts within this book are so well done that I am going to have to read it a second time to look at the story line with new eyes and take it in again now knowing how it ends.

The best I can say about the book is that it was nothing like I thought it would be and yet it was everything I could have hoped for.

That's why I am giving it 5 out of 5 thumbs up.

This book appealed to me because of the story description. Unfortunately I was not able to get into the story. It was well written and the characters were well presented but it was not where I was at the time. Sorry!

The Red Word is not an easy book to love, let alone read, but that is, I believe, Sarah Henstra's intention. After all, the act of rape is violent and "uncomfortable" for victims; discussing rape culture, especially on university campuses should be equally so for all involved. In that, she succeeds because The Red Word is indeed difficult reading.

Some of this deliberate discomfort by Ms. Henstra has to do with the structure of the novel. Set up in the Greek style of storytelling, there are no chapter breaks per se. Rather, she structures each section by its Greek description. For example, one section is "deux ex machina" while an earlier section is "dicaeologia" or defense plea. These section headings, which also extend to the separation of the story into books, have the purpose of hinting to readers at what is to come in the story without giving away details. To have such deliberate directions about one's reading placed directly into the story is disconcerting if only because it is unfamiliar. It is a bit like a stranger handing you a brand-new phone and walking away. You like the phone but don't quite know what to do with it or why you were handed one.

The characters are equally disrupting. They are unabashedly unashamed of their attitudes, behaviors, and intellect, priding themselves on their support of fellow women and the women's movement in general. In fact, one might easily say that they prefer to use shock and awe as their primary method of proving any point they want to make, whether that be testing one's acceptance of gay relationships, casual nudity, use of drugs, or their suspicions regarding the preying on women that may or may not occur during frat parties. With Karen's entrance into Raghurst's world, Ms. Henstra also uses class differences to further unease, hinting at the idea that feminism and fighting against a rape culture on campus is something about which only the privileged students with no need to work have time to do. Karen, as the only resident of Raghurst to need a job to help pay for things finds herself caught in the middle of both cultures with no desire to improve the situation and a naivete that is a challenge to accept as natural. All of this combines into characters to whom it is difficult to relate and about whom you don't care in the slightest.

While Ms. Henstra deliberately created characters you won't like and structured her story in a way that can make for awkward reading, she saves her strongest punch of provocativeness for the language she uses throughout the novel. Throughout the story, Ms. Henstra spares no one with her descriptions or choice of scene. Intellectual conversations between the characters are frank and unapologetic in their academic nature. Sex, consensual and otherwise, plays a large role throughout the story, and she depicts it all without embellishment. These are sex scenes, not love-making or some equally gentle euphemism. These are sex at its most primal and basic - the rutting of young adults on the cusp of adulthood, frantic to extract as much pleasure and experience out of college while they can. Some of these scenes you see as an observer, but others are as a participant, which force you to experience the same fear and disgust as the first-person narrator. If you are squeamish, dislike frank sex scenes, or cannot read about rape or rape scenes, this is not the book for you.

The thing is though that no matter how uneasy you are reading The Red Word, the point Ms. Henstra is attempting to make is an important one, especially in this #metoo era. As the women of Raghurst turn to ever more shocking ways to draw attention to their fight, Ms. Henstra all but slaps you in the face with the warning that we are our own worst enemy when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Not only is it too easy to lose focus or go too far in the fight for justice, other women are more likely to derail your efforts than men. Women are quicker to judge other women for what they wear and how they act. Women are quicker to side with men if a situation gets out of hand. Fighting a rape culture of any sort can be successful but only when all women work together to drive the changes. Just one woman who does not agree makes the fight that much more difficult. It is a simple message, but the way in which Ms. Henstra establishes it is powerful and provocative making The Red Word a necessary novel for the times in which we live.

This is a difficult book to review and I started out not knowing where I stand and what star rating to give it, but the more I think about it the more of a bad taste it leaves in my mouth. It’s hard to shake off what I think are some unconscious messages in the novel that seems to want to make excuses for golden boys who belong in fraternities and demonise feminists for being “extremists”.

First, in tems of style and construction, this book purportedly takes a lot of inspiration and thematic concerns from Greek myth both in content and form. The “Greek system” of US college fraternities is pitted against a radical feminist group, and our narrator, Karen, is caught between these two worlds. It’s set in the 1990s because that’s when a lot of feminist discourse and anti-establishment rhetoric became popular in US universities, I believe. I thought Henstra’s writing was most graceful and beautiful when she was simply describing things as she saw them. But the attempt to write in the manner of Greek poets and tragedians did not work; the prose was turgid and overbearing. For example:

“Look at them all sobershowered, each whose duty it is to carry the bones back to a man’s children. All their bronze helmets held in their laps. Look how they are ennobled by loss, valorvaunted by grief. O warmaking Dyann, thou stark of courage, where are you now when I need you?”

Or a description of hospitals:

“O blessings upon these tiled white rooms with their subdivided pools of curtainquiet.”

The narrator, Karen, explains what she finds lovely in her readings of the Greek tragedies: “Achilles was described in the Iliad as ‘godsfavoured.’ I liked how the translator would mash two English words together when no single one could accurately capture the Greek.” I like those mashups, too. But when you have the English language with English words, the mashing of two words together to create a kind of ancient Greek idiom doesn’t work. It might have worked if it was done in a more delicate, poetic way, and if it was kept to a minimum. But as it stands it really weighed down the narrative and－I really hate to use the word “pretentious”, but let’s admit it－it was pretentious as fuck. The symbolism of Greek myth felt tacked on and not organically incorporated into the story; in fact, it felt like a stretch in trying to force the contemporary story into a mythical form.

Second, I understand that this book wants to probe the grey areas of rape culture, especially on-campus rape culture. One thing that was striking to me, and I’m not sure if it was the book’s intention, was how straight men can appear so very anti-rape as an individual－as a boyfriend, or friend, or brother, father, whatever－but in a group situation with other straight men, where they’re drunk out of their minds, and women’s bodies are made available to them, then their anti-rape stance can quickly morph into, “Oh, we were all just having fun” or “Did you see what she did/wore, she wanted it/was enjoying it”.

But uncomfortably, as the book progressed, and even after it ended, it just became a #notallmen book. After a particularly harrowing “sex tape” is leaked (and the production of that tape is more complicated than expected, and that’s the point of the whole book), Karen looks at the frat boys she knows (because she’s dating one of them while in lust with another) and describes them as “soft and silly as puppies”. If the point of the book is to interrogate how a particular form of elitist, academic or institutional “first-world” feminism led by white women can be exlusionary and thus damaging to some people, I would think that you would want to consider women of colour, women living outside of the first world, trans women, and yes, men of colour as the subjects of intersectional oppression. But in this book, the radical feminists are the villains and the golden boys, the white frat dudes who come from financially-comfortable homes and have social cachet, are presented as sympathetic figures, just a bunch of rambunctious silly puppies; and in one case, as a victim-martyr of sorts?!

In the real world, we know about frat culture and rape. We know that men rape women and do everything in their power to pretend it’s not rape. We also know that straight men don’t walk around in fear of militant feminists. (In an ideal world, they should. Sadly, they do not. And that would have been a very different book. But that’s not the book Henstra wanted to write). In writing a “complicated” book about rape culture, muddying the waters about what is a very clear issue, the goal of this book seems to be to exonerate masculine “brotherhood” or to situate it in some mythical, fate-driven world of the ancients. That is not the world as we know it. So I’m left wondering: What’s the point of this book? Maybe the point is to read it as a fantasy, as a myth, but it has many real-world connotations.

The ending was unsatisfying, because the characters were inserted as archetypes and then were suddenly made to be more complicated, but you don’t actually see their complexities. You only see them from Karen’s eyes. And you don’t actually learn or gain anything from Karen’s perspective. She only operates in two modes: wilful ignorance and guilt. She’s young and impressionable and uncertain, a college student, so that is forgivable－but the narrative is split between two timelines, past and present, and present-Karen brings nothing to the table. Literally nothing. Zero. It’s the same Karen from before but with a job and more money. This is a wasted opportunity.

In this book about rape culture, feminism, and heterosexual relations, the women are all shouldering varying degrees of guilt about their complicity. The men? The men are off the hook. So I have to ask, what is complicated in this telling, and what new questions are raised?

There will surely be plenty of attention for and think pieces about this novel devoted to rape culture set within a context of classical literature and feminism.. It’s brainy and challenging and includes a lot of booze, dangerous sexuality, suicide attempts and death. As a timely, controversial statement of provocation, it deserves its place. As fiction, I found it overworked, too talky by half and marked by structural questions, like why did Karen have a relationship with Chet - other than to give the reader access to the frat house. And why set up the contemporary time scheme when it’s pretty much all about the past? As intellectual fiction goes, though, this one raises questions in a readable fashion. So there’s that.

For a conference, Karen returns to the town she attended college many years before. It is not a pleasant return since the place is connected to sad memories. Going back there brings it all again to her mind. Her roommates, nice girls at first, whose plan got completely wrong. Her then boy-friend and his fraternity GBC who always treated her nicely but also had another, darker side. The teacher they all admired in their gender studies classes. And the scandal that shock the whole town.

Sarah Henstra’s novel tells different tales with only one story. First of all, we have the strong protagonist Karen who as a Canadian always stands a bit outside her fellow students’ circles. She doesn’t have the same background; neither does she have the rich parents who provide her with all she needs not does she come with the intellectual package that most of the others seem to possess. The need to earn money to support herself keeps her from leading the same life as they do. This also brings her into the special situation between the groups who soon find themselves at war.

The central topic, however, is how college students deal with sex. On the one hand, we have the partying during which much alcohol and all kinds of drugs are consumed which makes the young people reckless and careless. On the other hand, we have the planned drugging of young women with Rohypnol to abused them. There is a third perspective, represented by the academic intelligentsia: the classic image of the woman as victim, portrayed in history and literature throughout the centuries and which did not change in more than two thousand years.

“The Red Word” could hardly be more relevant and up-to-date in the discussions we have seen all over the word about male dominance and indiscriminate abuse of their stronger position. Sarah Henstra does not just foreshadow what happens at the student houses, she openly talks about the rape that happens there. And she does provide a credible picture of what happens afterwards, of how women are accused of having contributed or even asked for it, of lame excuses for the male behaviour and of the psychological effect these experiences have on the students – both, male and female. It is not just black and white, there are many shadows and motives behind their actions, Henstra integrates them convincingly.

A felicitous novel with a very important story to tell.

Ugh. Surprisingly, I managed to finish this, and most of it in less than one night (I was only on page 66 this morning) because my Netgalley ARC expires today so I had to.

I wasn't enjoying it, so I told myself I would read until page 100, and then quit if I still hated it. It was just vaguely interesting enough for me to want to know what happens, so I kept going, and quickly read through it. I'm giving it 2 stars because I did manage to finish it.

But, God, the people in this book are horrible. Everyone is a god-awful person, except maybe the one guy who we are supposed to hate (at least from the start of the book, as he is portrayed as the first evil-doer). The women in this book are terrible caricatures of every stereotypical feminazi lesbian in the 90s. They are deplorable, evil people. Even the narrator, who I suppose is supposed to be sympathetic, finds out the awful truth behind the major plotline in the story and still manages to defend the actions of the women involved, brushing aside the horrendous things they did.

Also, the writing is pretentious as hell. It's haughty, but not in a subtle way that would add to the book. No, there are just random paragraphs that almost read like someone else wrote them. The first few chapters were especially brutal (even the descriptions of things and places were pompous and overly flowery), but then it got reeled in a bit, thankfully, and made it more palatable.

As someone who nearly minored in classics in college (the only reason I didn't is because they required us to take 2 years of ancient Greek, and I definitely had no desire to do that to myself), the weird attempts at integrating classical style into the middle of chapters (random paragraphs being all "O Dyann, blah blah blah" in the middle of a scene) annoyed me to no end. Also, this vaguely seems like an attempt at retelling Helen of Troy, but then at the end they blatantly call it that, and any subtle parallels to the story are suddenly literal. It shouldn't have to be mentioned by a character (literally at the end of the book, "Oh my God. You're like Helen of Troy." It should be obvious enough without that declaration (and it was), so that was akin to someone explaining why a joke is funny. It completely ruined any cleverness that the plotline had (which was minimal to begin with) as a nod to the Greek classic.

There were also a lot of weird things that I didn't understand, mainly:
- The random scenes at the end of random chapters that were written as though they were a Greek play (why?)
- This isn't really spoiler-y because as far as I know it doesn't really have an impact on anything that happens in advancing the plot, but what was up with the main girl having masterbatory fantasies about her roommate with one of the frat bros repeatedly? That's a common occurrence throughout and it really doesn't make sense to me at all.
- The entire premise of the present day and flash backs. All the present day stuff was essentially pointless, especially the conference. The minor relevance it played in the plotline was not really needed. It was just filler and made things more confusing.
- Occasionally there were weird tense things...in the same paragraph it would go from present to past tense even though it was all being talked about in the same time period.

For a book about rape culture on college campuses, this book does a huge disservice. The author tries to bring up some very controversial and relevant things (e.g., when both a guy and a girl are so intoxicated that neither can really consent in sound-mind, is it rape? She also touches on the pervasive rape culture topic of "asking for it" by drinking too much, wearing revealing clothing, etc). But, any of the legitimate points the author is trying to make about rape culture (in Greek life, especially) are completely overshadowed by the despicable actions of the women in the story, to the extent that the men end up appearing sympathetic, which I don't think is the type of message the world needs right now. This book does not help support victims, help prevent victim-blaming, or contribute to changing the conversation around sexual assault.

I love the author’s. writing and the timeliness of the topic. I especially appreciated her deft handling of the main character’s struggle to understand her college year. I think this would pair well with Cats Eye by Margaret Atwood, Red Clocks, Shrill by Lindy West, or Hunger by Roxane Gay.