In the year following the attack, Roxane was sent to a prestigious boarding school where, away from the watchful eyes of her parents, she could eat as much as she wanted. So, she kept it to herself and continued to bury this secret deeper by overeating more and more food. As a result, she couldn’t bear the thought of telling her parents about the rape. The event was devastating on many levels: since Roxane had already been intimate with this boy, what she experienced was a heavy feeling of shame – as if the attack had been her fault for defying the values of her Catholic upbringing. When she was just 12-years-old, Roxane was raped by her boyfriend and a group of other local youths. What she could never have expected was that a tragic act of violence would derail those plans and set her on a completely different course. In her early years, Roxane was raised Catholic and believed that if she did well in school she could grow up to be a respected doctor. Roxane Gay was born to a family of Haitian-Americans who lived in Omaha, Nebraska.