I am not trying to say I have all the answers. "I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human," she writes in her book, a collection of essays about race, gender and sexuality, pop culture, politics and herself. Whenever they've deviated from those expectations, they're seen as a symbol of feminism's failure, instead of as real people who could never be perfect. Feminists, all too often, are expected to be perfect, to conform to the ideals of "Capital F" feminism. "Bad Feminist" is not a critique of feminism but of what that term has come to mean, why people have such negative attitudes toward it and how those attitudes have limited real progress. "There's something especially pleasurable about that, and she did it repeatedly." "It's particularly enjoyable to read authors who reveal something to me that in one way is common or ordinary but that I've missed in my own observations," political commentator and MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who featured Gay on her show in September, told me in an interview. Roxane Gay is nothing short of being arguably the most important writer of the year. And her book tour was called "a rock-star tour" by the Chicago Tribune. She's heading a new high-profile feminist publication, "The Butter," a sister site of The Toast, a feminist blog launched in 2013. Now "Bad Feminist" (released in August) is a New York Times best-seller, and her writings for the Times, Salon, The (U.K.) Guardian and The Huffington Post often go viral. In a review of her 2014 novel, "An Untamed State," Time magazine declared "let this be the year of Roxane Gay." Her renown had only begun to blossom. Equal parts teacher, novelist, memoirist and cultural critic, the 40-year-old Haitian-American and Purdue University English professor can pick apart prejudice lying beneath the surface of a piece of art but still make reading about it a deeply personal experience. She'll crush authors or filmmakers for perpetuating stereotypes while acknowledging their point of view. Her words can glide but they also can stomp. Reading her is like watching a virtuoso modern dancer. Heartfelt, witty, wrenchingly personal, socially conscious, Gay has the intellectual verve of an academic, the wit of a popular writer and the intimacy of an old friend - the one who invites you over on a Friday night to chomp on Doritos while cracking up, then falling asleep to "The Real Housewives." She may dub herself "Bad Feminist," but Roxane Gay might just be the best type of feminist for these times.