Roxane Gay – a prolific talent in troubled times

Roxane Gay, An American writer and commentator, author of the Bad Feminist essays and a memoir Hunger has announced that she had weight loss surgery this January. She has been super-morbidly obese and has fought against the fat-shaming culture, so she was unsure how her public would react to her news. Talking about it she says ‘The dominant narrative around weight-loss surgery is that it changes your life and makes everything better.‘ But she points out that people who have weight-loss surgery are more likely to commit suicide or get divorced because their spouses cannot cope with the changes. Evidently the first year is the worst and she says she feels miserable and cold most of the time.

Born 15 October 1974 7.48am Omaha, Nebraska to a family of Haitian descent, she was gang raped aged 12 which she says, not surprisingly, changed her life irrevocably. She does have a very challenging chart with a New Moon in Libra conjunct Uranus on one side and Mars Venus on the other all square Saturn in Cancer. Mars Saturn is one of the significators of cruelty, sometimes sexual abuse, and tied into her New Moon would make it all the more central to her life’s experience. Her Mars Venus makes her passionately enthusiastic and she is very prolific with several books out, writes for the NY Times and has various other publishing and writing interests.

She also has a Water Grand Trine which is creative and healing for others, if not for herself – of Saturn trine Mercury in Scorpio trine Jupiter in Pisces.

She’s facing the toughest test of her life as tr Pluto is square her exact Mars, Sun, Moon conjunction from early 2018 to late 2019. Pluto is the planet of transformation but it grinds slowly through, dismantling old structures and old attitudes and can feel extremely bleak and stuck on the way through. In her case it is hitting three planets at once which will make it all the more stressful. And her Solar Arc Mars, Sun, Moon will conjunct her Neptune in 2020, in the middle of the purgatory of  her Progressed Moon going through her 8^th, from this autumn for two years thereafter. So it won’t be remotely easy for her.

One thing weight loss does is face the individual up to the psychological reasons why they gained weight – often as a defence against the fear of being vulnerable. It also removes the comfort blanket of eating, so feels punishing. Poor lady, she’ll need a great deal of support.