Haitian-American author and cultural critic Roxane Gay is about to see one of her most personal stories brought to television.
Lifetime will premiere Surviving the Silence: The Roxane Gay Story on Saturday, September 5, at 8 p.m. ET, with streaming available the following day. The original movie is based on Gay’s 2017 memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.
The film follows Gay from the trauma she experienced as a 12-year-old girl and explores how that experience shaped her relationship with food, her body and her sense of safety as she grew older. Sexual violence is central to both the memoir and the film, but the story also focuses on survival and the complicated process of understanding what happened and finding her voice afterward.
For Gay, Hunger was deeply personal. In the memoir, she writes about gaining weight after the assault and how becoming physically larger became connected to her desire to feel protected. She has described the book as one of the hardest things she has ever written.
But this story is also about Haitian identity and family.
Gay was raised by Haitian immigrant parents and has spoken about growing up in a Haitian household and spending summers in Haiti. Her work has often explored identity, race, gender, sexuality and the experiences that shape how people see themselves and the world around them.
Her literary career includes Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, An Untamed State and, of course, Hunger, which became one of her most widely discussed works.
The Lifetime adaptation stars Sunnii E. Bartee as Roxane Gay and Hilda Martin as young Roxane. Gay is also involved in the production, with Lifetime listing her as a writer on the project. Asia Youngman directs the film.
For readers who have followed Gay’s work, this is more than another Lifetime movie. It is a chance to see a story that Gay spent years putting into words brought to the screen — while introducing her story to an entirely new audience.
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