Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Roxane Gay
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. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” 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 point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save 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 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.
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05 stars is not nearly enough.
Reading this, for me personally, was a very powerful experience. As a woman who grew up fat, my most vivid experience in middle school was being followed by a group of boys to gym class. As they followed me, they talked loudly about how disgusting my body was. When I was in elementary school, girls in ballet and gymnastics classes asked why I wore leotards because wasn't I too big to be seen in them? In college, when a boy took advantage of my body, I had grown up thinking I would never be worthy of a boy looking at me as a thing of desire, so who was I to complain when he disregarded my "no"?
These experiences have changed me in ways I have slowly discovered in the years since. Roxane Gay's experiences have made me reflect on my own. Her writing lays the injustices done to her body in a raw way.
Of course, with my own experiences, there is another layer: the way I move through the world today affords me many body privileges. To see the difference in the way I navigate the world and the way Roxane Gay does forces me to face the idea that while people have been mean in my past, I don't worry about whether someone will dread sitting next to me in an airplane.
This book has made me reflect on how far I have come. There are so many nuggets that used to be true for me (and some that still are). I still never use a shared armrest. I will pee my pants before I ask someone on a plane to move. A lot of these things have to do with taking up space. I now embrace the idea of taking up space on my yoga mat, but even that has taken years to realize.
Thank you, Roxane Gay, for writing your experiences down. This book is an extraordinary look into one person's experience, but it is also a jumping off point for one's personal reflections. It's challenging and heavy to read, but entirely worth the work. There are so many layers here...
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