Hunger by roxane gay
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The first time I saw Roxane Gay, at a reading in Philadelphia for her book An Untamed State, I felt love I’d been pinched. Here was a woman I admired so acutely, in a body I wasn’t expecting, a body that in some ways looked like 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 overweight writer, I have always been aware of how rarely I see other fat writers. As with so many other categories of identity—race, gender, sexual orientation—that lack of noticeability is very much at odds with the makeup of the general population. Folks are often surprised when I make this point. They express disbelief that fatness (a synonyms they seem uncomfortable saying, or even alluding to) is any kind of obstacle to being a writer. On the surface, this makes sense: Pages look the same no matter what the storyteller weighs, right? Why should it matter?
Yet we glimpse, all the time, the ways it does matter. Last summer, Claudia Herr, then an editor at Knopf, casually told Entertainment Weekly that publishers consider about certain factors unrela
Four reasons Hunger is such a life-giving 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 entity that of an average 12-year-old miss to one that, at its heaviest, weighed 577 pounds. She is explicit about the sentimental – 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 admit you are a victim
She wound up as a “woman of size” because she “began eating to change her body” after a boy she loved, plus several of his friends, raped her in a cabin in the woods when she was just 12.
Being raped, she writes, prompted Gay to change her body because she wanted to create a barrier against the rest of the world. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and
Hunger
From the New York Times best-selling writer of Bad Feminist, a searingly sincere memoir of sustenance, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your need while taking concern of yourself.
"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 accepted essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about meal and body, using her own heartfelt and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her control 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 operate of violence that acted as a turning point in her young existence - and brings listeners along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
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Praise
It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be empathy 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 Same-sex attracted shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto
At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat — 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, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.
New York Times
Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so brave, 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 be sure that Hunger will touch a nerve, as so much of Roxane Gay’s writing does.
Newsday
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