Hunger
2016
- biography
- african american women
- overweight women
- body image
- eating disorders
- adult child sexual abuse victims
- discrimination against overweight persons
- sexually abused children
- mental health
- psychology
The story
“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.
What it’s like
Spare, unflinching first-person prose with short declarative sentences and a conversational voice that is exact rather than ornate. It circles back to the same wounds the way memory does, and its sensory world is domestic and bodily: kitchens, takeout containers, the weight of a body moving through rooms that feel too small, with food described more rueefully than sensually. Reading it feels like sitting across a kitchen table from a candid friend late at night. The pacing is uneven, slowing into long reflective passages before snapping forward. Its mood is raw, clear-eyed, and quietly defiant, with a melancholy that is more honest than bleak. It suits a quiet evening alone, a long train ride when you want full absorption, or a reflective weekend read. Emotionally it is intense. It depicts childhood sexual assault, binge eating, disordered eating, and the cruelty of weight stigma. The assault is recounted without graphic detail, but its weight runs through the whole book. Not gentle. For readers drawn to frank memoir about bodies, trauma, and self-acceptance, who value unvarnished honesty over comfort.
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