In the book she writes about several ways she has satiated that hunger throughout the years- her drama geek friend who was kind and only ever asked for her friendship Jon, a boyfriend from the Upper Peninsula during her grad school years people she’d find on internet chatrooms and particularly those from sexual abuse forums and her family. It is a metaphor for her loneliness and want of human connection that will make her feel safe and understood. Hunger is a metaphor her intense hunger symbolizes far more than her body’s cues to eat. She is so utterly vulnerable that readers won’t be able to help but feel vulnerable in reading her book as well.
Gay writes powerfully, conveying the full range of emotions she felt- palpable is her hurt, anger, fear, guilt, numbness, self-loathing, isolation, and loneliness. But as a woman, with the possibility of it happening to me and/or someone I love and the fact that so many women have had to experience that is horrifying.
As a woman not directly affected by sexual assault, I can only go so far in understanding the author’s experience. When Gay was twelve years old, she was ganged raped by a boy she loved and his friends in a cabin in the woods behind her home. I naively figured it would just be about her relationship with food. When I first picked up Hunger, I had no inkling that the book would involve Gay’s sexual assault. Hunger is a memoir of the whys of her body, of sexual assault and rape, trauma, guilt, loneliness, family, victimhood and survivorship, and the lifelong process of healing. Hunger is not only a memoir of physical hunger or the way Roxane Gay ate herself to fatness but why she did. It’s an intensely honest book, and there are many passages that are tough to read, but I think it’s a profoundly important narrative, and a perspective that was missing – conspicuously absent on reflection – in our world.Books end up in our hands at serendipitously perfect moments of our lives sometimes Hunger has been one of those books for me. The writing sometimes feels repetitious, but it reflects the near-constant frustrations, negative messaging, and indignity that she lives with in a world both fixated on evaluating, monitoring and reporting on her body, while also refusing to accommodate her. Eating therefore becomes a way for Roxane to feel safe.
She is unable to say anything to her family, and processes this trauma on her own. Then at age 12, she is the victim of a sickening, monstrous rape, which destroys any sense of security she once had, while also bringing her overwhelming, life-long shame. Her weight gain hinges on a before and after before, she had a trouble-free childhood playing with her brothers and feeling deeply loved and safe with her family. Even her father – who would clearly do anything to support her –naively says things like “I am only telling you what no one else will,” when what he says is what the world tells her – forcefully and contemptuously – every day.Įating for Roxane is something of a coping mechanism, which seems to have tipped into a blurred act of compulsion, too. Many of the aspects of her daily experiences should (and do) provoke empathy, not pity. Unlike most personal stories about weight, this is not a ‘triumph’ narrative about her losing weight or conquering her ‘unruly’ body.Īs a super obese woman (someone with a BMI of 50 or more), Gay details the daily intrusions and humiliating ordeals that she endures from shopping for food (strangers being so brazen as to remove items from her shopping cart), clothes (where options are incredibly limited), boarding a plane (and dealing with non-compatible belt extenders and casual cruelty from other passengers or attendants), going to a restaurant (where careful investigations need to happen in advance to determine whether chairs have fixed armrests), walking down the street (where her body is treated like a public space itself – highly visible but invisible – bumped into, stepped on, shoved aside), even going to the doctor’s office (where she deals with condescension and dehumanization). Hunger is partly what it’s like to be overweight in a fat-phobic world, but more than that, it’s a memoir of Roxane Gay’s specific experience, what her body has gone through, and she’s not speaking for anyone but herself.