Halse Anderson explained why she chose to write “Shout,” her response to the #MeToo movement, in free verse as opposed to giving a clear-cut storyline: “Poetry is writing from the bone marrow,” she said. Gay’s been crowned a cultural critic for her New York Times bestsellers “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger,” but her latest, she told The Times, isn’t about her at all. Gay edited the 2018 anthology “Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture,” a collection of contributors’ essays exploring the spectrum of survival Anderson’s 2019 memoir, “Shout,” tells the story of her own assault as a 13-year-old through free-verse poetry. Times Festival of Books, Times columnist Robin Abcarian moderated a discussion with Gay and Halse Anderson about their latest books that deal with the repercussions of rape culture.
“All the time we tell women to forgive - forgiveness,” quipped Gay, using a different F-word.
And despite the conversation’s sensitive nature, they laughed. An entranced audience hunched forward in their seats at USC’s Bovard Auditorium to hear authors Roxane Gay and Laurie Halse Anderson discuss their latest on rape culture.
