Now in her early forties, and despite decades of trying to lose weight, she’s large enough to need two seats when she flies coach. “My memories of the after are scattered, fragmentary,” she writes, “but I do clearly remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body would become so big it could never be broken again.”īy the time she was in high school Gay was obese, and she has remained so. She traces her decades of struggle with her body to the trauma of being raped, dividing her life-in some sense, her very self-into before and after. Out of some mixture of shame and shock, she kept the rape a secret from her devoted and loving parents for many years, though other children around her knew about it at the time and tormented her for being a “slut.” Gay, who is well known as a fiction writer and feminist cultural critic, has publicly acknowledged the rape before, but she confronts it very directly here, conveying its breathtaking cruelty in a way that’s tough to read but makes the enduring aftermath fully understandable. Gay was gang-raped when she was twelve years old, lured to an isolated cabin by a boyfriend, who led the assault. In a culture that relentlessly shames fat people, it’s an act of courage for anyone Gay’s size simply to write honestly and without apology about her physical existence, but she goes much farther here, confronting the traumatic roots of her condition and revealing her ongoing struggle to make some kind of peace with her body and with her own emotional and physical hunger. The book explores, frankly and in detail, what it’s like to live in a body the world feels entitled to judge.
#Roxane gay hunger memoir how to
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 care 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.Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body tells the story of why and how she became morbidly obese. In Hunger, she explores her past-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. 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 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. I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.