Roxane Gay has nothing good to say about her exercise bike. Or the elliptical machine. Or a long walk. It’s “all horrible,” the writer explains by phone, her tone as blank as her post-workout selfies on Instagram Stories. “34:33 cardio,” a recent caption read, her face glistening and joyless beneath a hot-pink head wrap. It qualifies as #fitspo, but Gay’s version refuses to conform to influencer banalities. “What does it mean to live in an unruly body?” asked Gay in a prompt to writers for her 2018 pop-up magazine with Medium. In the previous year’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay offered up her own answer in unsparing, incisive detail. Lately, that unruliness is matched by Gay’s commitment to fitness tedium. For her, there’s longevity to consider, and weight loss—”but not in the way that is toxic,” she points out. “I just recognize that, in general, it’s required for stamina.”
Girding for the long haul seems wise in a year worn down by pandemic, social injustice, and election malaise; amidst all that, Gay is juggling book projects, a New York Times advice column, and screenwriting, plus a podcast she cohosts called Hear to Slay. But a new collection of Audre Lorde’s work, edited by Gay and out this week, speaks to the need for a deeper kind of stamina. “Unfortunately, so much of what Lorde was writing about 30 years ago is still applicable today,” says Gay, who imagines that Lorde would be “absolutely unsurprised” at what little has changed. Themes of police violence, housing instability, and the marginalization of Black women surface in the book—alongside the sensory pleasures of a kiss or hair washed with fresh flowers. “She valorized the body as much as she valorized the mind,” Gay writes in the introduction.
It’s Lorde’s 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” that resonated most, Gay explains, “because, especially during times like these, we tend to question the value of art and poetry and literature. And it does matter.” Here, in a three-day wellness diary, Gay similarly nurtures the body and the mind, from a night-owl rereading of Yaa Gyasi‘s Transcendent Kingdom to a VR workout she actually enjoys.
Thursday, August 27
8:30 a.m.: I wake up because my wife [Debbie Millman] has a meeting and is up early, and once I am up, I am up even if I am still tired. I have the worst habit of checking in with the internet, first thing in the morning, so I look at my phone and immediately feel even more exhaustion because there is no such thing as good news anymore. I read for a while and have a granola bar and some water.
Noon: I work out with my trainer three days a week. Since the pandemic began, we’ve been meeting over Zoom, so we do our thing for 45 minutes, mostly arms but some core and legs, too. She’s into that whole body thing. Then I get my cardio in. Normally I do cardio first, but my days have been getting really hectic. Now that the world has found a way to function virtually, I have to sit in way more meetings than I would like to. It’s kind of obscene how many meetings I have [[to sit in]], and it’s obscene how many of those meetings could simply be an email. But I digress. I hate exercise. I love complaining about exercise.
1:35 p.m.: My assistant Kaitlyn, who is incredible, stops by with my weekly order from a local purveyor of fresh foods and charcuterie—many peaches (for my wife), basil, some pasta, a sandwich, and eggs from a local farm. Also, Kaitlyn, who is incredible, brings coffee for which I am grateful because in 25 minutes I have to teach a three-hour writing workshop via Zoom.
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