If you ask Roxanne Gay, how she likes to be introduced, she'll say something like this.

My favorite description of what I do is when people name me as a writer first, because I am a writer

first. And you'd think that would be the obvious description, award-winning author, an editor,

a publisher, a TV writer, an opinions contributor for the New York Times.

But that's not what happens.

It'll be like, she has a PhD in Twitter, and I'm like, no, I have a PhD in rhetoric and technical communication.

Now, I wouldn't say she has a PhD in Twitter.

I would say she's come from a generation of what they call very online.

She didn't come up through the ranks of columnists at regional newspapers or at a national magazine.

She gained international fame because she had a distinctive voice that stood far from the madden crowd.

This week, Roxanne Gay is out with a new book called Opinions.

It's a collection of her essays from the last decade,

but it also has her reflections on how her opinions have changed

and what it's like to become famous for sharing them

and how social media changed the way we all think about

criticism and professional opinion. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment.

When Roxanne Gay first shared her opinions on the internet, she was like the rest of us.

Just sharing.

There was no plan at all.

When I first came on social media, it's because I was living in the middle of nowhere and I was

kind of bored and I was like, oh, I can talk to other people.

And it was like, it reminded me of chat rooms way back in the day that sort of came to prominence

...