The essays in Bad Feminist were originally published in the American Prospect and various websites such as Salon, Jezebel, and the Rumpus. In Bad Feminist, Gay’s essays explore being a feminist while loving things that seem to be at odds with the feminist ideology such as liking the color pink. The second book Gay released in 2014, which she is most known for, is her collection of essays, Bad Feminist. Additionally, An Untamed State is often viewed as a fairy tale because of its structure and style, especially in reference to the opening sentence, which begins with “once upon a time”. The novel explores the interconnected themes of race, privilege, sexual violence, family, and the immigrant experience. Her husband fights for her release over thirteen days and the novel also highlights Mirelle’s struggle to deal with the traumatic experience in its aftermath. First, she published her debut novel, An Untamed State, which follows Mirelle Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American woman who has been kidnapped for ransom which her father refused to pay. In 2011, Gay published a short-story collection, Ayiti, an exploration of the Haitian diaspora experience, which immediately highlighted her raw writing talent that makes her “one of the voices of our age” according to the Canadian National Post.
