On a vacation to Port-au-Prince, Mireille, a wealthy Haitian-American woman, is kidnapped at gunpoint from her car while her husband and child helplessly watch.
Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, looks at another form of identity dissolution: the way selfhood breaks down in the wake of trauma. For inspiration, she looks to a passage from Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, that likens a woman’s many different (and sometimes opposing) identities to forms of drag, a series of wardrobe changes, each outfit expressive of its own truth at the same time it disguises others. Her essay for this series is a brief, powerful defense of the multivalent nature of one’s self-a coming-to-terms with the way we inhabit numerous contradictory personae. Gay’s varied formal approach reflects the content of her work, which tends to pit the messy nature of individuality against the simplistic ways we talk about identity.
Not Enough Has Changed Since Sanford and Son Hannah Giorgis
