It is hard to read the abuse Gay gets for her size. If there is anything useful in the experience it is, she has said, in the way it engenders empathy, for other lives, for difficult lives, for different lives. Reading, she says now, does the same – fiction mostly, but also non-fiction, “because you just think, ‘Oh my gosh, imagine if that were my life, imagine if that were my children, how would I feel?’ – The Guardian