In Roxane Gay’s piece “ I Once was Miss America” she tells the story of when she was in grade school and she would get bullied for being “different” than the rest of the kids. It seems like the piece is going to be about Vanessa Williams and how she overcame the racial standards at the time and won Miss America but she then goes into how she too faces challenges for her race. She was one of only two Haitian kids in a school full of Americans. Gay also goes on to say that she isn’t a very talkative person and she doesn’t interact well with other due to her shyness. This doesn’t help her in trying to achieve her goal of being like the Wakefield twins. Due to Gay being picked on and made fun of she uses the Sweet Valley High series in order to escape reality and be able to live in the shoes of the popular girls. Books like these often give false expectations of how life really is yet they are a great way to see how other people live. As Gay gets older she realizes that she no longer wants to be like the Wakefield twins and more like Vanessa Williams. This piece has a really great message in that even when life isn’t going so well for you, books are always a way to escape the real world from time to time.