It is difficult to read, and it is uncomfortable but Gay manages to shine the light on conversations that simply are not happening. It is a raw book, and Gay makes herself vulnerable to the reader. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced.” “I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. “If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows,” she writes. She does not shy away from writing about the shame or her own struggles, but ultimately Gay owns her story and her body. But what Gay writes about, what she makes you feel, are the conversations that are left out.
She is right that it is not a motivational book in the sense that it does not follow the classical narrative that is expected of her.
“It is simply a true story.” Gay is hard on herself here and throughout the book. Gay starts the book by warning the reader that it is “not a story of triumph, not a book that will offer motivation.” “Mine is not a success story,” she writes.
And Roxane Gay drives that point home with Hunger. To believe that the weight of an individual is in any way an indication of how much they are suffering or how sick they are is dangerous. It happens within communities that are focused on eating disorder recovery. This attitude trickles from the tabloids and books and the inexperienced layperson talking about someone’s diet “going too far.” It occurs at the level of health professionals, of highly educated and trained people. They talk about disappearing and restriction. They talk about starvation and wasting away. When people talk about eating disorders, they too often talk about anorexia or sometimes bulimia. I have read countless memoirs and books about eating disorders over the years, but most of them centered on starvation, on thinness as both the initial goal and the inevitable cage. Gay writes about unimaginable sexual trauma that she experienced early in her life, how she began to embody her trauma through eating, how she navigates a world that is simply not accepting of her body. Having read her other work and knowing what Hunger was about, I thought I was prepared for what was in store in the pages before me.
#Roxane gay hunger criticism scholar series#
She then skyrocketed to the mainstream with Bad Feminist, a series of biting and intelligent essays exploring what it means to be a woman and a feminist.īut now what Roxane Gay brings us is Hunger, a memoir so beautifully written that you won’t want to put it down, but so raw and painful that you’ll have to. She brought us a series of short stories in Difficult Women. Gay had brought us An Untamed State, a novel of sexual violence, race, and privilege. The first time I read something by Roxane Gay, it was (like many people) her best-selling essay collection, Bad Feminist.