In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay writes from the gap between political conviction and actual human behaviour: the space where taste is compromised, contradictions accumulate, and nobody manages to embody their principles without occasionally making a mess of them.

She moves thoroughly, delving between cultural criticism, memoir and political essay, then excavating nuance on gender, race, sexuality, popular fiction, reality television, reproductive rights and the stories America tells about violence.

Gay’s refuses to confuse ideological purity with useful thought. She is sharp on the ways culture limits women, especially Black women, while remaining alert to pleasure, embarrassment, fandom and complicity. The essays vary in scale and intensity, but together they make an argument for feminism capacious enough to survive ordinary failure: less a badge of moral perfection than a continuing practice of attention.

First edition, Harper Perennial, 2014. Paperback. Light cover and edge wear; clean and firmly bound.