A collection of Roxane Gay’s best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more.
Gay has an ability to blend the personal and political in a way that feels simultaneously gentle and brutal ... It is a testament to Gay’s writing, as well as an indictment of our politics, that nothing here feels dated ... You look at a cultural moment through Gay’s eyes and, by the end, you see the world differently.
...amounts to a book-length shrug ... At least you can say there’s no false advertising. Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays is titled Opinions, after all, not Thoughts or Ideas. She gives us exactly what she promises: a series of opinions on various subjects, arranged haphazardly, adding up to nothing substantial at all ... It isn’t Gay’s fault that feminism became so devoid of meaning that our hard-won slogans were easily stripped from their context and used by bad actors to fight against abortion rights, to protest vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic, and to harass trans women. But Gay, in her anti-intellectual stance, became a kind of mother figure for those who would prefer to avoid thinking their way through cognitive dissonance, smoothing back their hair to coo, 'you’re already perfect, just the way you are' ... It’s not an argument for acknowledging complexity, it’s an argument for not thinking. It’s an argument for focusing, first and foremost, on our own comfort ... Such tepid writing makes no intellectual, ideological or psychological demand of its reader. Working against ideology might look like a principled, sophisticated stance, one that values nuance and uncertainty, but instead it reveals a lack of rigour. If anything, you could say that 'comfort' is her primary ideology, as she uses the word and its variations dozens of times throughout ... Readers see her waffling and confuse it for courage ... 'Extend your empathy' is her instruction – as vague and thoughtless as an advertisement for a new moisturiser. This book is proof that the anti-fascist philosopher Simone Weil was right, when she wrote: 'There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.'
This is a must-read for not only fans of Gay’s work, but for everyone interested in reading intellectual, accessible, and important takes on timely topics.
