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Hunger breathes secrets of self-hatred and shame that will resonate with any reader with a beating and open heart. The cruelty of bystanders and participants, lovers, jokers, and drunks, teachers and strangers, no ones and every ones. The cruelty of adolescence and disappearing innocence. I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied-the hunger to stop hurting. I was swallowing my secrets and making my body expand and explode. Gay explains that to become large would mean to become undesirable and therefore safe but, instead, she receives the ironic inverse: She gained weight to become invisible, but the more her body grew, the more visible and vulnerable to harassment and further trauma she became. Readers are shown a room of survival that Gay has created since she was 12 years old in which food provided a way to comfort herself, and a blueprint to build a “fortress” of safety. While Gay has written about “becoming the girl in the woods” in previous work, this is a longer meditation on rape, but it doesn’t-and doesn’t need to-zoom in on the details of what happened it focuses on the impact of loss and being lost. I am tracing the story of my body from when I was a carefree young girl who could trust her body and who felt safe in her body, to the moment when that safety was destroyed, to the aftermath that continues even as I try to undo so much of what was done to me.Īny person who follows Gay on Twitter, or has read Bad Feminist, or can infer from Untamed State, knows she suffered a violence that, in its detail, cannot truly be understood. There are two harms narrated throughout Hunger, one preceding the other. Gay chooses the only language that makes sense to address brutal trauma and the unending, socially accepted cruelty targeting fat people: simple, directive, and cornering. There are no lyrical take-offs or fancy-shmancy anything.
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Gay’s signature intensity arrives in unadorned prose rows and rows of structurally modest sentences originating back to the gang rape she endured as a 12-year-old and the decisions to transform her body over the decades by overeating and deliberately gaining weight in order to protect and soothe herself. It is not a literary device for symbolism. Hunger is one of the many stories from Roxane Gay, and it might be her most memorable. After her last book, Difficult Women, a collection of short stories, Gay returns to nonfiction with her memoir, Hunger, 300 pages of stunning vulnerability.