Roxane was moved to a renowned private school a year after the incident, where she could eat as many as she wanted far from her parents’ prying eyes. She couldn’t face the notion of informing her parents about the rape as a result.Īs a result, she kept it to herself and tried to bury the truth even deeper by eating. The incident was terrible on several levels: because Roxane had already been intimate with this guy, she felt a deep sense of shame, as if the attack was her responsibility for rejecting her Catholic upbringing’s ideals. Roxane was raped by her boyfriend and a gang of other local adolescents while she was just 12 years old. What she didn’t anticipate was a horrific act of violence to disrupt her goals and send her on entirely another path. Roxane was reared as a devout Catholic who felt that if she performed well in school, she might become a well-respected doctor. Roxane Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to a family of Haitian-Americans.