Gay hunger
The Hunger to Stop Hurting
Roxane Gay’s new book—the “most difficult writing experience of my life,” she admits on Page 4—is called Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Those parentheses seem designed to call the ownership of her body into question. They announce the author’s hard journey: After years of feeling alienated and powerless inside her body, Gay will attempt, through her storytelling, to take full possession of it.
Gay, who at one point weighed pounds, speaks of her flesh as “layers of protection I built around myself,” likening her frame to a “fortress” or “cage.” She says that the idea of enclosure in other spaces enchants her. She describes the enthralling process of growing “immersed in the anonymity” of the internet; she loves “the water, the autonomy of moving through it, feeling weightless”; she loses herself in food, in its comforting oblivion, and then finds herself submerged in her physical form. This notion of the self as concealed or drowned, in require of recovery, goes back at least to Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” which literalized the poet’s
Roxane Gay: Hunger
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In ‘Hunger’, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning gesture in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately conserve herself.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take protect of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
affect + emotions + feelingsf
Four reasons Hunger is such a vital book
Gay exposes her life with an unflinching honesty that – ultimately – helps to provide salvation, which is all the more remarkable given that Hunger revolves around a shocking incident Gay spent decades trying to suppress.
Photo credit: Eva Blue
She writes to disseminate the story of her body – specifically, how her body changed from being that of an average year-old girl to one that, at its heaviest, weighed pounds. She is explicit about the emotional – and physical – pain of living in the world when you are “super morbidly obese”, according to your body mass index.
2. Sometimes it’s okay to recognize you are a victim
She wound up as a “woman of size” because she “began eating to change her body” after a boy she loved, plus several of his friends, raped her in a cabin in the woods when she was just
Being raped, she writes, prompted Gay to change her body because she wanted to create a barrier against the rest of the world. “I knew I wouldn’t be fit
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Praise
It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment—both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it. Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto
At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.
New York Times
Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so brave, so raw, it feels as if [Gay]’s entrusting you with her soul
Seattle Times
Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can