Kriti Mehrotra
Directed by Asia Youngman, Lifetime’s ‘Surviving the Silence: The Roxane Gay Story’ chronicles the real emotional and physical aftermath of the sexual violence that the titular individual endured. It is the true story of Roxane, a shy, story-loving young girl whose entire world turns upside down at age 12 when she is attacked by at least a dozen young men in a cabin in the wilderness. The film essentially traces all the key moments of her life in categories of “before” and “after” what she describes as “the incident,” along with how they shape her into the woman and writer she becomes.
Surviving the Silence: The Roxane Gay Story is an Adaptation of Roxane Gay’s Memoir
Written, narrated, and executive-produced by Roxane Gay herself, Lifetime’s ‘Surviving the Silence: The Roxane Gay Story’ is an adaptation of her acclaimed 2017 memoir. In ‘Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,’ she opens up about her experiences as well as her trauma for the first time, sharing with the world what she kept secret for over 2 decades. However, the book begins with her early years and loving family, so that’s how the film starts to set the tone, too, before moving into the darker aspects of her reality. Neither the book nor its visual adaptation holds back on anything that she endured or its aftermath.
As the daughter of Haitian immigrants who worked hard to provide her and her two younger brothers with a good life, Roxane was never bothered by how she grew up in different parts of the country. Whether it be Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, or Virginia, the family reportedly spent time in each place thanks to her father’s job in civil engineering before returning to Nebraska, where she was born. It was there, in the woods of Omaha, that her entire world turned upside down at the age of 12, by which point she had already developed a passion for books, reading, and words, in general.
Since shifting from state to state wasn’t easy for Roxane because of her shy, quiet nature, she found such solace in stories that her family even gifted her a typewriter to show her they see her. It turns out she was merely 4 years old when she started writing/concocting tales of her own, resulting in her finding true joy among almost nothing and nobody but fictional characters. She did make a few real friends along the way and grew close enough to a boy at the age of 12 that she considered him a boyfriend, only for him to turn out to be the cause of her biggest nightmare.
Roxane Gay Faced the Trauma of Her Sexual Assault With Food and Words
Although Roxane has only ever described her early childhood as happy and normal, considering she hails from a supportive, well-off family, her entire worldview changed at the tender age of 12. According to her writings, she had decided to go on a bike ride with the boy she thought was her boyfriend one day in the early 1990s, and they had stopped at an abandoned hunting cabin. They were roughly a mile into the Omaha woods near her home, she once candidly penned, but she had no idea that a dozen of his friends were already gathered there, waiting for their arrival.
What happened next is every girl’s worst nightmare, with Roxane writing that the 12 boys not only took turns on her but also broke her in a way she didn’t even know was possible at the time. She thus returned home a changed person, yet she told no one what had transpired because she didn’t know she was supposed to, and she felt guilt as well as shame, even though it wasn’t her fault. It was not long after that food became a crutch for her – she had heard boys don’t like overweight girls, so she decided to gain as much weight as possible to protect herself from further harm.
Roxane went up 40lbs in months, driving her family to grow so worried that they sent her to a fat camp – she shed almost all of the additional weight there, but soon gained it all back on purpose. Things only became worse when she began attending Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire, because each comment on her body only triggered her further. Thankfully, a teacher named Rex McGuinn noticed that the rather ambitious young writer’s stories were often very troubling and sexually violent, so he suggested he walk her to the counseling center.
Roxane Gay Opened Up About Her Sexual Assault After 20 Years, Not Letting it Control Her Life Anymore
Although Roxane’s teacher noticed she was struggling, got her some help, and later became one of her mentors and a key supporter of her writing ambitions, she still had bad days. In fact, while Mr. McGuinn’s tireless backing enabled her to hone in on her dreams, she still unwittingly placed herself in dangerous situations over the years owing to the traumas of her past. These included going to bad parts of town without informing anyone while in high school, and dropping out of the pre-med program at Yale at age 19 to travel to Arizona to be with a 44-year-old man she met online.
It took a year for Roxane’s parents to find her after she ran away from Yale because she refused to tell anyone where she was, following which she returned to Nebraska to be closer to them. She then enrolled at another university, earned a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s degree, and a Ph.D., all the while finding her real self again through writing before establishing herself as an author. She penned erotica in her early 20s before moving on to literary works, and she finally started writing about her own experiences in the early 2010s to really come to terms with her past and her trauma.
Since then, Roxane has managed to shatter all bounds as she has found her calling as a writer, a social commentator, a feminist, and a woman who will never shy away from expressing her opinions. Whether it be culture, slavery, Haiti, or power, she is always open to discussing everything while also teaching creative writing, serving as the founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, editing Gay Mag, and hosting her own podcast. She has since admitted that while she obviously wishes “the incident” never happened, she knows it helped shape her into the fierce, open-minded, and resilient woman she is today.
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