Publishers Weekly (starred review)Ī heart-rending debut memoir from the outspoken feminist and essayist. Gay denies that hers is a story of “triumph,” but readers will be hard pressed to find a better word. This raw and graceful memoir digs deeply into what it means to be comfortable in one’s body. Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can be sure that Hunger will touch a nerve, as so much of Roxane Gay’s writing does. a memoir that’s so brave, so raw, it feels as if ’s entrusting you with her soul Seattle Times At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality. Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel CantoĪt its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat - Gay’s preferred term - in a hostile, fat-phobic world. HUNGER is an amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.
Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another.
Hunger should be mandatory reading for all, including men.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. “These weight fluctuations of famous women are tracked like stocks because their bodies are, in their line of work, their personal stock, the physical embodiment of market value… Celebrity bodies provide the unachievable standard toward which we must nonetheless strive.” Gay also takes to task the obsessive culture of celebrity watching. “What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?” She notes the hypocrisy involved in the body beautiful mission statement propagated by this show and others like the Khloé Kardashian presented Revenge Body. Gay refers to the 2004 season of the US iteration of The Biggest Loser and the backlash when contestant Rachel Frederickson dropped from around 118kg to 48kg in a few months. “It is a show about unruly bodies that must be disciplined by any means necessary, so that through that discipline, the obese might become more acceptable members of society.”Īnd the goal posts keep moving. “ The Biggest Loser is a show about fat as an enemy that must be destroyed, a contagion that must be eradicated,” she writes.
Initially drawn to The Biggest Loser, even toying with the idea of auditioning, Gay now says she sees it in a very different light.
The rapid growth of Gay’s profile as one of the go-to voices of contemporary feminism gives her a platform, however personally difficult, to tackle the damage done by onerous and unrealistic ideals, those propagated by reality TV and celebrity gossip magazines. It is a horrifying fact that Gay struggles to share and one that destroyed her confidence and ability to be loved, something she wrestles with to this day.Įating as a means to survive that pain wasn’t simply about the immediate comfort food offered, but also about building her body into a fortress that would dissuade men from hurting her again. When she was 12, the boy Gay was dating led her to an abandoned cottage where she was gang-raped by him and his friends.
About showing empathy for the stories that go untold, including those of people of colour and queer people. Hunger is a vital treatise about being seen and heard. Sadly, as the furore surrounding a podcast interview for Mia Friedman’s Mamamia underlined, too often others do not stop to listen, to understand. They think they know ‘the why’ of my body. “People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions.