Blog #2

In "I Once Was Miss America," Roxanne Gay portrays in a compelling fashion how the people and media we relate to can have a striking and unfortunate distance from reality. She tells the story of how she became inseparably attached to a book series about perfect "normal" people from an American suburb with no tangible or impactful problems. Gay wanted to identify with these characters because she also found herself in an American suburb, but struggled to find any real-life relation to their God and Goddess like appearances and status. She desperately wanted to be a part of the same social groups that the characters she loved in "Sweet Valley High" but instead learned an important and crucial lesson about the cruelty of classmates. Gay was not afraid to see herself as beautiful, confident, and want-able before she made herself vulnerable to her classmates and was brutally punished for it. Even so, she finds it easier to immerse herself in a world where she can identify with characters that don't have real problems, because maybe it makes hers seem easier to deal with. Gay wanted to live in a reality where the only thing she has to deal with are who's dating who, social hierarchy, and attaining wild success instead of only moderately wild success. Instead, Gay had to deal with very real and severe problems in her public school years, like racism and discrimination, bullying, and dealing with a less-than-perfect appearance.

Even as an adult, Gay was ecstatic to return to the world of "Sweet Valley" where everyone is the same and no matter what the circumstances, everyone will be okay. She ignores the awful writing and looks past the deplorable character and plot development to search for likeness in the characters which were so important to her as a child. She continues to be a dreamer, despite the malice of the classmates who once tormented her, and this is perhaps her largest success. Regardless of the constant teasing from her classmates who were so obviously superior to her in the gloriously healthy social setting of public school, she still feels comfortable fantasizing about winning an Oscar with her famous husband. She is still a dreamer, perhaps due to the comfort and solace she found in "Sweet Valley."