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This tension is echoed by her storytelling. Gay hungers for companionship, for love, for acceptance, for simple courtesy. It’s a book about yearning, about hungering for many things. Hunger connotes a desire for food, right But, this book is much more than a book about food. The contradiction of Gay's experience weaves through her narrative: She built a new body to protect herself and regain some semblance of control, but in doing so she lost even more of who she was. Anyone, who knows who Roxane Gay is, will assume the book has to do with eating. Gay falls into a pattern of instructing the reader on what she wants them to take away from the book instead of simply telling her story.Īs the book progresses these moments fall away, and once Gay finds her voice, the result is extraordinary. In the beginning of the book, Gay calls Hunger the "most difficult writing experience of life." Unfortunately, at times her struggle to understand her experience is all too apparent. At her heaviest, Roxane Gay weighed 577 lbs. Informed by cultural norms, Gay understood that obese women were unattractive, so she ate in excess to ensure she would never again be brutalized. Roxane Gay is a successful and critically acclaimed writer, international speaker, novelist and feminist. As someone who writes about weight and weight loss, and works in the health and fitness industry, I was interested to read another perspective. The rape, Gay recounts, left a void inside her, and she used food to fill that void. The 2017 memoir, Hunger, by Roxane Gay, has been on my list of ‘must reads’ for a while.
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In the "after" the reader watches Gay collapse into a traumatized shell of her former self. Throughout the book, Gay refers to her life in two parts: "before" and "after." In the "before," Gay is a normal, if awkward, preteen girl from a loving family. She kept this trauma as a secret for a very long time. One day the boy she had a crush on led her into the woods, where they met up with his friends. For Gay, this journey began at age 12 when she was raped by a classmate and a group of his friends. The plot (again, STOP reading if you want to be totally surprised): Roxane led a fairly normal and happy life until she was 12.