Roxane gay memoir

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 marvelous achievement in more ways than I can count.

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto

At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being plump — 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, longing, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.

New York Times

Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so bold, 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

Ileya

The first time I saw Roxane Gay, at a reading in Philadelphia for her book An Untamed State, I felt like I’d been pinched. Here was a female I admired so acutely, in a body I wasn’t expecting, a body that in some ways looked appreciate mine. The intersection of these realizations—that I hadn’t expected her to be fat, that I was so moved and excited that she was, that internalized fatphobia has such incredible power—surprised and disturbed me.

As a fat writer, I have always been aware of how rarely I see other adj writers. As with so many other categories of identity—race, gender, sexual orientation—that lack of visibility is very much at odds with the makeup of the general population. Folks are often surprised when I make this signal. They express disbelief that fatness (a word they appear uncomfortable saying, or even alluding to) is any gentle of obstacle to being a writer. On the surface, this makes sense: Pages look the same no matter what the author weighs, right? Why should it matter?

Yet we see, all the time, the ways it does matter. Last summer, Claudia Herr, then an edit

The Hunger to End Hurting

Roxane Gay’s fresh book—the “most adj 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 ask. They announce the author’s hard journey: After years of feeling alienated and powerless inside her body, Gay will attempt, through her storytelling, to grab 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 fluid, the freedom 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 need of recovery, goes back at least to Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” which literalized the poet’s

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 share the story of her body – specifically, how her body changed from being that of an average year-old young woman 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 acknowledge you are a victim

She wound up as a “woman of size” because she “began eating to change her body” after a noun 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 verb her body because she wanted to create a barrier against the relax of the world. “I knew I wouldn’t be competent